I’ve mentioned before that often companies will request a photo along with the resume, but here is a sampling of the ridiculous questions I’ve been asked in an interview:

• How old are you? (older = more experience)
• Are you married? Are you single? Do you have a girlfriend? (an indication of how hard I’d be able to work)
• Where are you from? (for the purpose of knowing what ethnicity I am)
• What’s your sign? (the interviewer wanted to know my ‘personality’)

yeah…uhm…all very relevant to my competence on the job of course!

on shanghai china unicom’s site, there is already a detailed page on the iphone shanghai china unicom’s iphone product page - though it says coming july 2008??

So that’s just what I did yesterday. Things haven’t been going so well for me so I thought it might be good to explore the outskirts of shanghai. That’s how I ended at Jia Ding (嘉定）

嘉定 is ~20km outside of shanghai or about 30-40 min direct bus ride away. I decided to go there because the gardens at hui long tan (dragon pool) is supposed to be pretty decent considering it’s proximity to shanghai.

The final tally for the cost of the trip? 32 RMBs! Yep, that’s right… less than $5 USD!

Bus ticket (direct from city center to jiading): 9 rmb each way
Money spent for lunch: 9 rmb (composed of street food and an ice cream bar :)
Entrance ticket to hui long tan 汇龙潭: 5 rmb

Really packed bus…there are even fold out seats for people to sit in the aisle. Somehow that seems like a fire hazard to me.

Jiading bus station drops you off right at city center. ~ 20 min walk to 汇龙潭

View on my way to 汇龙潭

I stopped off at Shanghai University (上海大学）on the way to check it out…

the dorms don’t look too bad…though I dunno about the color

basketball is quite popular nowadays - though people seem to have a different definition of athletic wear. Check out the jeans….I’ve actually even seen people play badminton in suits!

“学生是国家的财富, 为师生服务是我们的光荣” is translated to “Students are our nation’s wealth, serving our teachers and students is our honor”
You probably won’t see that at a convenience store near your university…

I saw this sign at a big intersection - it tracks how many accidents have happened at this particular intersection dating from Jan 1 - Feb 20. According to this, 16 people died, 26 hurt from a total of 32 accidents.

This way to hui long tan

This way to fahua pagoda

The pagoda was just ok - I didn’t really want to pay 5 rmbs to go up it

Area by the pagoda

Area by the pagoda

This is a makeshift skating ring in the park - full of skatboarders, rollerbladers, and roller skaters

The shanghai expo mascot….which is horrible in my opinion. But then no one asked for my input

Though it’s on the outskirts of shanghai - it’s still not short of people…

The main drag on the way into 汇龙潭

Finally…

My view from the bench by the water :) I took a little catnap here for 15 minutes. it was awesome

Cool patterns on the pebbled road

It’s named Dragon Pool because long ago 5 rivers came to a head at this location - thus it looked like the claws and fangs of a dragon

I don’t know if you can really see it, but basically it’s a stone bridge that juts out on both sides…I can’t say I felt particular safe crossing it

Another view of the dragon in the pool

This well was constructed around 1506! It was a ‘rest area’ of sorts for travelers

All in all, it was just what I needed. If you ever get bored in Shanghai and want to get away for an afternoon - I’d recommend it.

Little did I know that the practice still goes on every Sat and Sun! I stumbled upon it making my way thru the park.

曾经听说过在人民公园父母们会帮子女寻找对象，不过我一直以为只是为了金猪年而组织的。上周末碰巧路过时发现了每周六日都有！

Check it out

No display stand? No problem :)

Even a section for shanghainese living abroad!

A rare one with a picture

Who needs matchmakers when you’ve got eager DIY parents? ：）
有了热情的父母们，媒人就免了 ：）

Ballpark figure of 200 people or so and it seemed like it went on for a few hours.
超于我的预料，两百余人

The ads were basically resume format and usually included:
-Age
-Height
-What kind of job they had
-If they owned a car and/or house
-Whether they were Shanghainese citizens (having a hukou or Shanghainese citizenship entitles them to better benefits)
-Parents’ occupations(?!?)
-Basic requirements of what they were looking for

挂在广告上的资料包括
-年龄
-身高
-单位
-有否车房
-上海户口
-父母情况
-对象需求

I was a little surprised that parental occupations made it on the ad. From the parent’s point of view, having your son/daughter marry someone with a sketchy family background isn’t ideal.

All-in-all not exactly your typical personals ad in the US, but then again personal ads aren’t usually written by your parents. Know your target audience! These are ads written up by parents to entice OTHER parents.

Reflective of the generation that grew up in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s in China, people are more practical and status oriented. I can understand the motivation because parents want their kids to have a good life (as measured by living standard) and the differences can vary drastically due to the chasm in income levels in China. Thus, a widely held stereotype in Shanghai is that an out-of-towner blue-collar man without a car/house is at the bottom of the suitor totem pole.

So my question is, how come in the Asian culture (including Korea and Japan also, AFAIK), parents are eager for their kids to get married? I don’t buy the usual argument that they want grandkids because there are lots of western parents who also want grandkids. The only thing I can think of is that in Asia, the 2 generations are a lot more intertwined, thus the parents have a lot more vested interest in their son/daughter finding the right suitor?

Or are there other better reasons?

毕竟子女介绍都是父母写的，并且是用来引起对方父母注目。但是看到描述了父母情况还是相当得惊讶。在国外，父母们大多数只会以对象本身的状况，背景，和感情来衡量是否合适，而稀少会问父母情况更何况用来评价。

最终，不同时代有不同的价值观，国外也不例外。

有一点还不是很清楚，为什么在亚洲父母们（句我说知包括日本及韩国）都会特别为子女着急婚姻大事？有些人说此来于盼望早一点抱抱孙儿女，但是难得西方人就不要吗？也不会。唯一想得通的是成年时两代关系仍然亲密（相对国外而言），因此父母自然会注重子女的对象？

还有别的更好的解释吗？

This is what a black chicken looks like defeathered…with the head and all.

I do a decent amount of cooking, but it’s the first time I’ve cleaned out the innards of a bird, much less chop off its head. I’ll be honest, it was a little unsettling, but it’s a good reminder to me that I’m eating a previously living animal. Eating meat in my mind not inherently good or bad, but recognition of that choice is important, especially in today’s society where we put plastic wrapped deskinned, de-boned meat or frozen fishsticks or chicken nuggets into our shopping carts.

之前写过乌鸡对身体比较补，因此最近在超市看到时突然想在家亲自试试扽一锅乌鸡汤。

买回来之后才发现乌鸡除了去毛基本上都没怎么处理。在一个塑料包装，去骨，去皮的社会里长大对我而言，看见食物的头是一件令我心里不安的事。更何况还要把它斩掉！

我知道这也只不过是生活习惯的区别而已，但是我觉得看到完完整整的一只鸡给了我个提醒我是为了我的生计而牺牲了这只鸡。在我眼里食肉本身并不好坏，但是意识到这交换在是重要的。

If I had a nickel for every time I heard that “3G is just around the corner”

Last week, the gov’t finally gave out 3G licenses! As opposed to the US where carriers bid on spectrum, it’s doled out to the state-owned carriers.

There are probably a million reasons as to why the holdup, but first and foremost is the desire to develop a homegrown system - TS-WCDMA used by the almost monopoly carrier, China Mobile.

China Mobile (>450M users) - TS-SCDMA
China Unicom (~100M users)- WCDMA
China Telecom (previously fixed-line operator only) - CDMA 2000

With the issuance of these licenses, the gov’t also seeks to shake up the playing field a bit since up until now, whatever China Mobile says goes. I am a little skeptical since once an operator has established dominance, all the supporting infrastructure serves to perpetuate the advantage (retail service centers, stores carrying recharge cards, etc).

Of course, with state-owned enterprises anything can happen, since they don’t exactly play by ‘normal’ market rules.

Huh?

He said a lot of firms are either no longer reimbursing for cab expenses or have capped a quota, so he’s feels a tangible impact on his business.

talk about the trickle down effect…

on another note, there seems to be a bit of reverse migration going on. Before a ton of people would venture to the 1st tier cites like shanghai, beijing, etc for work, but with manufacturing plants closing down, people are heading back. Unfortunately, there probably aren’t a ton of jobs back home either!

Binging on tv drama series is a pretty common occurrence here amongst my friends…thus, I found myself doing it waaaay more since moving here. In comparison, I can count on 1 hand the number of marathon tv series I’ve watched in the US (Sopranos and Band of Brothers come to mind).

It seems to me that both tv watching habits and the show formats themselves play a pretty big role in the differences:

1) First and foremost, US tv shows have episodes that are truly episodic - each episode has its own story arc that far outweighs the arc of the show. What I mean is that the consequences of the plot developments in each individual episode often have little impact on the others. Thus, you can watch an episode of “Friends” from season 1 and then follow it with another episode from season 3 and you won’t feel like you’ve skipped a beat.

Maybe it’s done this way for syndication purposes?

In contrast, watching Asian dramas is the complete opposite. It’s more akin to one really long movie - each episode too has its own arc, but the focus is on how it advances the arc of the entire show. So forget about watching episodes out of order…and when you start watching a series in the middle, well, it’s like starting a movie 30 minutes in. Yeah, you can do it, but you feel like you’d rather start from the beginning. Which brings me to my next point….

2) All the shows you see on tv in China are online (often the most popular ones are from korea or japan). So when you stumble upon a show you like on tv, it’s highly unlikely that it’s the first episode. So what do you do? Go online and start from the beginning. 15 hours later, you realized you’ve watched the entire series.

Viewing habits do seem to be changing in the US with more dvd sets coming out and some series moving to the continuous format (24 for example)…but still behind China in this respect.

…yeah, I see binging on tv dramas as a good thing. so?

Remarkably, I’ve been seeing a slew of IP court cases recently such as Ctrip (think travelocity) suing Qunar (think kayak) for literally crawling Ctrip users’ hotel reviews - essentially syndicating content without paying. And Dianping (think citysearch and zagats and yelp) suing Aibang for basically the same thing - in which case dianping won. Lastly, Sohu (major portal) by Shanda (major online game publisher) for republishing online novels.

Blatant ripoffs are still a plenty - I can’t even count on my hands and feet how many facebook ripoffs are other here (copying the entire site and sometimes even forgetting to change logos!) but it’s a small sign of progress.

It’s not really ethics driving the change but I think people feel like they’ve work hard to build something and want to protect it. Who’d thunk it?

UPDATE: looks like Qunar just lost and will have to stop infringing! Though the penalty is a paltry RMB 1,000. Doh! but it’s progress!

Check out the flying snoopy! Fuzziness courtesy of my webam :)

On the train wasting time till we get to nanjing

Not exactly the most scenic train ride I’ve ever been on

See what I mean?

Only 2 hrs ride via bullet train from Shanghai

Pinnacle of architectural design

The scooter in the park is classic

Gates to the old city walls in Nanjing

Nanjing taxis - maybe my next car should be the same green

Most of the traffic lights have a giant timer - I wish all US traffic lights would have this

Ah…the local street food we’ve been looking for (don’t mind the bright pink plastic surgery sign above)

Wait - Colonel Sanders? Are we at the right place?

KFC’s rule China

Found it….except there is a line. Doh!

Soupy dumplings…mmmm

Vermicelli noodles with duck blood…sweet

More food….

The picturesque surroundings leading up to Sun Yat Sen’s mausoleum

”天下为公“ basically means everything under the sun is of concern to the public

Male lions are characterized with a ball under his paw

Females - with a little cub

Up the 337 steps…

The next tony hawk

“I promise this is the first time I’ve made a peace sign in pictures” - S. Yeah, right

View from the top

See the 2 holes? The big one was made by japanese bombardments, the little one….er…by the chinese themselves

…by the Red Guard - not exactly a bright spot in Chinese history

Wandering around town at night

Equivalent of the White House

Random tangent - but check out this photo, it’s from 1948’s chinese games. Look carefully to the left, it says Coca Cola! Coke was in China in 1948?!? That’s amazing to me.

A really famous painting of a chinese soldier taking down the chinese flag - it was during the period of Chinese infighting.

The State Room

With Sun Yat Sen’s photo on the wall

The VP’s office is pretty modest

Corridor on the grounds

The garden behind the grounds

UPDATE -

I asked the cab driver how many people lives in Nanjing and he said 7-8mil, 10 if you count the out-of-towners. And here I was thinking that nanjing was a small city compared to shanghai.

The most striking difference was the openness - as in physical space. Things feel slower and more relaxed because there aren’t skyscrapers descending upon you from every direction, plus it does feel like there are less people (but it’s all relative).

It is a pretty cool place to visit, but as far as living - I feel like if I am going to go city life, I’d choose shanghai. If I was going to choose some place with a better balance, probably hangzhou.

UPDATE 2 -
My friend chastised me for leaving out the symbolism of the lion and lioness. This was his comment…
雄狮代表的是强大雌狮代表昌盛 - which roughly translates to the lion represents “strength and power” while the lioness “flourishing prosperity”

Now in a most recent ‘expose’ by CCTV (gasp!?!), they uncover that Baidu has been taking advertising from fake online pharmacies. Aside from the obvious, why has this been such a big commotion? It’s because Baidu mixes in it’s paid search results with its organic ones. The only sign that it’s an advertisement to the consumer is a word “推广” (chinese meaning ad) at the end versus “百度快照“ (chinese meaning baidu snapshot).

Check it out - not exactly easy to pick out, huh?

With that said, most netizens are tacitly ok with it, but all this came to a head when people were getting phony online pharmacies for top results while searching for keywords like “cancer” or “tumor”! There is now debate whether this practice is ‘legal’ but no matter how you slice it, it certainly isn’t ethical.

More about it at Forbes and Renmin Wang (in chinese)

What do people do? Not really sure, but it’s the 7th most popular search term on Google.cn as of right now (2pm China time). The top 6 are all related to this girl who apparently had cybersex on video. Interesting…I wonder if there can be some correlation on analysis on people who searched BOTH. haha

Even more interesting write-up about it at Baidu baike (basically a poor man’s wikipedia). It lists some suggestions on how to celebrate - some of the more entertaining include “streaking” as suggestion #4 and karaoking #7

A spokesman from Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) claimed on Tuesday that Alibaba Group published posts on September 14 with misleading titles about Baidu’s “PR protection agreement” with food product manufacturer Sanlu on the websites of consumer-focused e-commerce site Taobao.com and business-to-business e-commerce company Alibaba.com Ltd. (1688.HK), reports Sohu. The reports said Sanlu milk powder planned to sign a RMB 3 million advertising agreement with Baidu if Baidu would remove Sanlu’s negative search results. Baidu said it retains the right to sue Alibaba Group for defamation, the report said. Baidu also announced on its online forum channel Baidu Post Bar on September 13 that it refused to sign Sanlu’s proposed PR protection agreement.

Alibaba Group welcomed the Baidu lawsuit and said that revealing truth to the public is its responsibility, reports Sina. Alibaba deleted the reports on Tuesday night from the Taobao.com and Alibaba.com Ltd. homepages, reports ChinaByte.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve heard of this, but first time I’ve seen it in print. Advertising is concentrated with the big portals in China just like it is in the the US, but it might not be just for brand or performance motivations!

1) Audits and closing down of all sites that do not have an ICP license. Basically to run any type of website in China you need some sort of ICP license (to different degrees depending on what kind of content is on your site). This has always been the rule, they just haven’t been very vigilant about closing down sites that don’t have it.

2) Scanning for unsavory keywords

3) Disallowing entry into datacenters for basically the whole month of August. Yeah, that means if your servers hardware goes down, too bad. Gotta wait until the end of august to get in there.

Looks like they aren’t kidding around.

It’s that they all cost 1 RMB!

Believe it or not, most restaurants charge you 1 RMB for napkins and for the really annoying skinflints, 1 RMB for chopsticks (even for reusable chopsticks and towelettes) ! Small Fat Lamb (hotpot restaurant) use to be like that, but I think they’ve since changed.

Besides being nickeled and dimed to death, what I wanted to point out was that starting today (June 1st), a new policy has been implemented that does not allow stores to give away free plastic shopping bags (defined by a thickness of 0.025mm). Yep, that means all supermarkets, shopping centers, roadside stalls, etc. This law was passed earlier this year in January as a means to improve the environment. Furthermore, as a part of the initiative, the gov’t is trying to curb the production, sale, and use of the bags while increasing the number places you can recycle them.

Brushing aside the enforcement aspect, I think it’s a great idea. Chopsticks and napkins, not so much. To steal a great phrase, I already “refuse plastics bags with impunity” and think that until there is some kind of financial impact, there won’t be much of a change in consumer behavior. Let’s just hope it works!

As an aside, I think US is even more plastic or package happy than China.

这三个东西有什么共同点？ 都是一块钱呀！

我刚来的时候很难接受在莫些餐厅用筷子还要一块钱。。。我记得小肥羊原来就是这样的，不过现在应该取消了。今天去了优衣裤才发现禁止提供免费塑料袋的政策已经实施了。 虽然之前一些朋友会嫌我抠门因为付那个毛巾的一块钱我都不愿意（这些东西还要付钱我很反对因此我从来不用）。。。但是我非常认同对塑料袋的政策。 我觉得人是个习惯的动物，如果没有什么额外的刺激，人是不会改变得。

反证除非实在没办法的话，我通常都拒绝拿塑料袋。。。希望这个新政策真正对环保有贡献。

To be honest the aftermath of it reminds me a lot of 9-11 back home, in the way that people are responding to the natural disaster, hearing about amazing human feats of survival, workers digging tirelessly to rescue the victims under the rubble…

From what I hear it’s been covered a lot back in the US, but I think here are a few links worth passing along. (It might be a bit slow for those of you not in China)

(From 南方都市报)
looks like a tornado went thru there…except imagine if there were hundreds of tornadoes simultaneously)

(From 南方都市报)
a couple taking their wedding pictures as the earthquake happened - this is 8 minutes after the first earthquake

People getting together in shanghai to remember the earthquake victims

Lastly, the government put out a notice saying “为表达全国各族人民对四川汶川大地震遇难同胞的深切哀悼，国务院决定，2008年5月19日至21日为全国哀悼日。在此期间，全国和各驻外机构下半旗志哀，停止公共娱乐活动，外交部和我国驻外使领馆设立吊唁簿。5月19日14时28分起，全国人民默哀3分钟，届时汽车、火车、舰船鸣笛，防空警报鸣响”

Essentially it says, from 5/19-21st, to remember the victims of the earthquake, the gov’t has decided that the flag will be at half mast, and must cease all public entertainment events. Further, on 5/19 at 2:28 there will be 3 minutes of moment of silence.

In response websites grayed out their logos or sites or even shut it down entirely for 3 days.

too lazy to take my own screenshot, here is one from shanghaiist

Similarly reported by Shanghaiist and Wangjainshuo according to QQ MSN China tabulates over 2 million users adding this signature! (in chinese)

To summarize, this was a response by chinese netizens to all the negative press China has been getting in the world arena. Furthermore, there has even been a call to boycott French goods (like carrefour) given what happened in Paris during the torch relay.

Politics aside, what I wanted to highlight was the phenomenon of using IM signatures as a viral tool in China. People in the US use email as the primary tool for everyday communication whereas in China it’s IM (as mentioned here and here). In one signature change, you’ve accomplished the equivalent of sending out an email to your 100+ contacts on your contact list. Moreover, when you email something funny or interesting to your friends, you probably only select a subset of friends whereas your IM signature is a broadcast to your entire contact list no matter if they are acquaintances or best buds.

I wonder why IM signatures hasn’t caught on in the US?

Mine is the shiny red one.

And it folds up too! Which is nice in case I get tired and can just put it in a taxi or head to the nearest subway.

I was a little worried with no gearing and the 16″ wheels, but luckily shanghai is as flat as a pancake so I haven’t missed those nicer options. The purchase ran about $80 which was just about the cheapest one they had, some of the nicer ones run up to $500-600 (20″ wheels, superlight frame, gears, disc brakes, etc).

So simply put, having a bike is a game-changer. I can’t say that I’ve missed having a car, but I do feel a renewed sense of freedom. Plus, it’s a decent way to get good exercise - when I’m not inhaling car exhaust that is.

Plus, I feel like this is also a good way to see and get to know the city better…check out some of the pics I took during my recent rides

French concession area is a good place for a nice relaxing ride

plus I found this cool old school motorcycle with a sidecar

Believe it or not, the following pictures are all from the same block

I found out the hard way that you get fined for ignoring this sign….luckily it was only 5 rmb’s.

These bike lanes make it much more pleasant to ride on the street - though in shanghai, you can’t seem to get away from people no matter what you do

First off, some frame of reference - since Ben Bernanke has taken over, the Fed has come out explicitly to target an inflation rate of 2%…so by that measure 8.7% is extraordinarily high. In slightly more concrete terms, it means that if your salary in 2007 didn’t increase by 8.7% nominally…you ended up with a pay cut!

But before you go pouring all your investments into gold in fear of inflation, one must keep in mind that that China amidst all this inflation worries still grew at 11.4% in real GDP terms in 2007! Which means the country came out waaay ahead even after accounting for inflation.

A lot of this macro mumbo jumbo doesn’t really mean anything to me on a daily basis…well, that was until this past week. For some reason, it hit me all at once…

1) The milk tea I buy around the corner everyday cost 3 rmb, that is until last week. Now it’s 4 rmb
2) One of my perennial favorites noodles bowls went from 18 rmb to 22 rmb’s
3) Today I had to cough up 548 rmb’s for the same exact bike my friend purchased a month ago at 498 rmb,

Bummer, couple that with the US dollar getting weaker, it’s a double whammy for me.

UPDATE: After writing this post yesterday, I found out another one of my regular hangouts reprinted their entire menu just to raise their prices…

物价涨是个热门话题，不过物价涨幅８．７％实际上对我来说有什么影响？算多吗？还是少？

要判断之前还是要有一些对比。　首先，美国Fed Chair, Ben Bernanke, 宣布了涨物价要控制在2%以内，用这个为标准，8.7%的确超级高。　从另外个角度来看，这就是说明如果你２００７年的工资没涨8.7%，就算工资被砍了。

不过，不能光光顾这个物价的涨幅，还要考虑到中国２００７年度实际经济增长率是11.4%，就是说，扣掉物价涨幅后，经济发展还是很火热。

通常这些经济大道理对我来说没什么实际的生活影响，不过我这个礼拜终于感受到了。。。

１）天天买的奶茶本来是３元，突然涨到４元了
２）我最爱的鱼香肉丝面从１８元暴涨到２２元了
３）同一款的自行车，我帮我朋友上个月买了４９８元，今天我自己要买的时候已经涨到５４８元了

加上了美元汇率续跌，我亏死了！

But at the last minute, one of my friends hooked me up with a press pass! Lucky for me I got to snap some great photos up close

Adam Levine rocking out…

their lead guitarist James Valentine - he kinda reminds me of david spade

My effort at an artistic shot…haha

Shot from my seat during the concert

The venue was full, but probably only held 8-10 thousand people

By the way, the prices for the concerts are pretty much the same as they are in the US…which is to say, it’s expensive. The tickets were 300 (~$42), 500 (~$71), 800 (~$114), and 1000 rmb (~$143). Though the advantage is that you get to see them at a more intimate venue.

Granted they don’t have a lot of songs to play, the concert lasted only about 1.5 hour or so (including 2 encore sets). Some people had actually started to leave before their encore sets, it made me curious if there are encore sets in chinese concerts? Also these are clearly planned encores…I wonder when it became a habit to script it?

But incredibly enough, as he was walking around the next day pondering whether he wanted to plunk down the dough for yet ANOTHER bike, he saw someone riding around on his LAST stolen bike! The girl probably was not the thief, but likely purchased it knowing that it was stolen - so all it took was a threat to call the police for the girl to give up the bike.

So it got me thinking, what are the chances of this really happening? It’s it like winning the superlotto or like the local pick 3?

To take a stab at figuring this out, I first had to figure out the bike recovery rate in Shanghai. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any official reports, but I did find that it’s 2% in New York City. Given how this article (in chinese) mentions that people don’t seem to get their bikes back, coupled with the sheer volume of bikes and adding a grain of corruption, I think even 1 in 500 is optimistic. But let’s go with that.

Now that we have some idea about the likelihood of him getting his bike back, what are the chances that he gets it EXACTLY 5 months after he lost his bike? I assumed that getting your bike back is a power law distribution. It intuitively make sense to me, meaning that if you’re going to get your bike back, you’d likely get it sooner than later. So using the zipf power law distribution, the chances of getting his bike back before day 150 (5 months) is about 99.33333% (1-1/150).

But what’s remarkable is that he got it back on day 150 and not day 151 or any day after. So to figure that out, you take (P(get bike back within 151 days) - P(get bike back within 150 days) which is 0.993377 - 0.993333 = 0.0000442. This just means that there is a 0.00442% chance that he gets it back exactly on day 150.

So now that we have both probabilities we can just multiply them together to see what the chances were for him to get his bike back AND exactly on day 150. This turns out to be (1/500)*(0.0000442)= .0000000882 which is about 1 in 10 million. Plus, I am ignoring that he got his bike stolen on day 149…but seeing as how common it is for a shiny bike…I’ll ignore it. haha

Clearly, it’s a rough estimate, but clearly it’s not exactly winning the powerball (1 in 146 million) but sure beats your state Pick 4 (1 in 10,000). Unfortunately for my friend, his prize wasn’t commensurate with the odds. doh!

上个周末我的朋友的自行车又被盗了，这次不多于五个月就没了。 我搜了一下，看起来这个问题是蛮普及的，据报道，95%上海市民至少1辆以上被偷过。50%三辆以上，34%四辆以上！ 在中国有4.7亿辆，多少赃车呀？

可是最巧的是，第二天他在犹豫是否要买新一辆车时在路上发现了一个女孩子骑着他上一辆被盗的自行车！把她揽下来之后，说了要报110，她就把车还给我朋友了。

那么我突然想起，怎么那么巧？这个巧合的概率实际上有多小？

我也不太清楚但是有一点好奇怎么去估？首先，可以看看找回来的概率。我在网上搜不到，但是参考了纽约城市的概率在2%左右(英文)。但是在上海，车量多了纽约的好几倍，而且加上了跟黑市场勾结的问题，我估计不会超过五百分之一吧。

但是这只说明找回来的概率，没考虑到恰恰在五个月之后找回来的概率。我猜测这个可以用幂律分布来模拟因为对我来说如果你能找回来，肯定越早越有可能。 因此，用了zipf幂律分布，正在第150天之内（5个月）找到的概率为99.33333% （1-1/150）

可是这个只是150以内，如果正要第150天，那就要用（P（151天以内找到）- P（150天以内找到）等于0.993377-0.99333=0.0000442。 于是，正好在第150天找到的概率为0.00442%。

最后我们可以把找回来的概率乘第150天的概率就等于(1/500)*(0.0000442)= .0000000882; 差不多千万分之一。 这个还没考虑到他的自行车在第149天被偷！

总之这个概率算不上什么双色球，不过总是比天天彩选4巧的很！最遗憾的是他所得到的奖跟概率不是相称的。

Before doing this startup, all the research told me that as far as the internet was concerned, information ruled in the US and entertainment in China. (New York Times, Keso-chinese, cnbeta-chinese, CWR) People point to things like demographics, 70% of internet users are under 30 in China versus 30% in the US (source: CNNIC) and lack of affordable entertainment as plausible causes for this behavior. Intuitively it makes sense, but to me, I was more interested in finding out if there was more detailed evidence to support that China is infact more entertainment based.

First order of business was to dig up some detailed data:

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) is the official government organization that publishes all stats related to the internet in China. The latest report (in Chinese) they put out was in Jan 2008. FYI their methodology was based on telephone interviews (fixed and wireless users) and online surveys, at about 46k and 70k responses, respectively.

Here is what they say about what services Chinese people use on the internet (based on the last 6 months)

我发觉了如果想更了解中国互联网的情况我不应该老是上国外的网站，因此最近强迫了自己天天泡在各种中国的网站。 说实话确实有一点累，不过发觉中西方的网站差异还是不小。 创办了垦一垦之前我看过一些对中国互联网的统计及观点，比如(纽约时报-英文, Keso, cnbeta-chinese, CWR-英文). 这些消息的共识就是跟美国相对来说中国网民偏娱乐。据业士人分析，因素于网民年龄结构 — 中国网民70%小于30岁，美国只30% （来源：CNNIC）或没有别的划算的娱乐选择。 确实有一点道理，不过我还想看看有什么比较详细的数据可以证明中国网民只对娱乐性的网站感兴趣。

中国互联网信息中心 (CNNIC) 最新的互联网统计是1月发布的，调查方法为电话抽样调查（手机和固定电话加起来4.6万份）以及网上问卷调查（7万份）。以下是网络应用状况（6个月之内至少使用一次）：

As another data point, I found the following data on chinese usage patterns at Chinarank. They indicate that they have over 4 million users (toolbar users and partner data) to sample from and their methodology for this particular survey was based on random sampling of users of the top 10 websites of each of the 12 categories of sites. Report here-Chinese

我又发现了另外一家公司，中国网站排名，的网民日访问网站比例的调查。据该报告，中国网站排名拥有超过400万的用户数据（通过工具条及合作伙伴）可做抽样。 以下的图表来至于“《网站流量分析报告》中所筛选的12 类网站为对象，了解抽样网民群体在一段时间(以30 天为单位)内访问这些网站的频率，从而分析最经常被网民访问的网站类别。”

So far so good. I think this passes my gut test, but as I have learned, high-level summaries only tell part of the story.

As I dug deeper into the CNNIC data, it seems like the penetration of services are fairly even across China’s provinces – which seems a little surprising at first considering the disparity between the urban and rural parts of China. After giving it more thought, it actually does seem to make sense, while the absolute number of internet users might be night and day in urban vs rural, it seems as though if you’re an internet user in China, your surfing habits are quite uniform. Very interesting.

This is a graph showing search engine penetration across different provinces in China. Source: CNNIC (not sure why they made it a line graph vs a bar graph)

看了这些总结之后发觉跟我事先的猜测一致，不过有时候总结时常会忽视了一些有趣的发现。 详细研究了CNNIC的报告时我发现了所谓的网络应用使用率在各个区域都蛮相近的，因为往往听到东西部经济发展的差异当时有一点惊奇。然而想了一下，还是有一点道理；虽然东西部的网民数量的差异确实存在，但网民还是网民，不管你是中国哪里的网民，上网的习惯及爱好都差不了多少。

以下是在各个区域的搜索引擎使用率（来源：CNNIC – 不知道为何用了线图，而不用图标方块）

80%+ in Shanghai and 60%+ in Tibet. Pretty remarkable if you ask me.

没料到在西藏百分之六十的网名还用搜索引擎！

There is one exception to my previous statement – in online shopping!

网上购物明显的与其它的应用不一样。

在上海已达到了40%以上，山西的4倍! 美国网民在网上购物的穿透深度只有66%（来源：Pew Internet） 而且这个66%的比例不限制于过去六个月。 虽然这个差距比我想象的少多了，但是还要注意这个数据没提到平率（我信在这点美国网民对中国网民还是乘上几倍）

Look at how high it is in Shanghai! 40%+ while the lowest province is well less than a third of that at ~10%. Keep in mind that at 40%+, it’s not that far from the 66% in US (source: Pew Internet) , and even then the 66% from the US is not restricted to the past 6 months like the CNNIC study. So in reality the gap is even narrower. Not to be carried away with this data, this of course says nothing about the frequency of usage, which I guarantee is many times over in the US.

Aside from the CNNIC and Chinarank study, I wanted to try a different approach and see if I could glean any support from looking at web site traffic data.

Before you dismiss the next section as completely unreliable given well publicized statistical biases in different measuring services (particularly with services like Alexa), I believe in triangulating I arrived at a decent set of data. Not wanting to get into a long debate about why a site made the list or not, I am pretty confident that the trend illustrated below is a good reflection of reality.

另外，我还是想从网站流量的角度来思考这个问题。 首先，我了解个个网站排名都有自己的偏见及局限（尤其Alexa），但是通过交叉校验法，在以下的数据里应该体现得出来实际情况。

Yeah, that’s a lot of logos. Here was how I came up with the above picture.

I first pulled up lists from the following places for the US side:
Quantcast Top 50
ComScore Top 50 (Jan 2008)
Compete Top 20 (Dec 2007)
Hitwise Top 15 (Feb 2008)

They all have their own sampling methodologies whether it’s toolbars, ISP data, cookies, etc, but by cross-validating (ie. appearing on multiple lists) I felt like it was pretty likely that they really belonged on this list. About half of the US sites appeared on all 4 lists while the rest only appeared on 2 or 3, mostly due to the fact that beyond 20 or so, I only had the Quantcast and ComScore list to work with.

Ok, so getting the China data is trickier. As far as I know there isn’t any really reliable website ranking service in China, so my only alternative was to rely on Alexa. Alexa is notorious for being gamed, but I’ve also heard that they’ve cleaned up lately… so the first thing I did was to benchmark Alexa US rankings with the list I just came up with. Remarkably, of the top ones that appeared on all 4 lists above, all but 2 were on Alexa’s Top 50. If you look at the Alexa list, it’s clear that there is some gaming that’s still going on, but it doesn’t seem THAT bad. So armed with Alexa China’s semi-accurate Top 50 and cross-checking it with Chinarank’s Top 50 sites (which is probably biased too – but it was another data point), I arrived at the China list.

Of course you can argue that if a site gamed Alexa, it was probably trying to game Chinarank, too. Fair enough, but there was a decent enough disparity between the two that I found it to be a decent validator. If there is a better approach, I am open to trying it.

Before I start drawing some conclusions, I also want to make clear some of the shortcomings of this list. First is that portals offer a ton of services (blogs, mail, maps, news, videos, etc), thus, they clearly have an unfair advantage over more focused sites. Second, this list does not tabulate proportion of reach by category, which is to say that fewer sites in a category doesn’t necessarily equal less proportion of traffic for that category, but it’s a reasonable approximation.

首先，美国网站流量的来源以下：
Quantcast 50大
ComScore 50大 (1月 2008)
Compete 20大 (12月 2007)
Hitwise 15大 (2月 2008)

每个调查公司都有自己的抽样方法，不管是通过工具条，ISP，或 cookies，但是通过了交叉校验法我认为还是蛮可靠的。以上的一半的美国网站都出现在四个列表上；剩下的一半基本上是靠Quantcast和ComScore来判断的因为列表不全的问题.

如果要分析中美国的网站对比最好是用同一个调查来对比，这样才可以保证对比有意义。但很可惜这4家在中国没什么可用的数据，因此就要依赖Alexa了。虽然为了Alexa的排名一些网站会用不同的手段来作弊，我听说Alexa最近又改善了统计的算法。到目前为止，一看这个列表， 很明显一些偏见还是存在的。不过简单的验证一下，美国15大网站在Alexa 50大，只有两个不在。 因此我觉得在这个情况下，尤其加上了中国网站排名50大的对比（一定也有一些偏见），还算可以用。有可能不是百分之百准确，但是趋势因该是正确的。当然你也可以说如果一个网站在作弊，对两个排名的网站不是都会有影响吗？看了两个排名之后，发觉还是有一些差异，所以这个问题应该不会特别大。另外，我也不知道有什么比较好的方法。

在做我的总结之前还有一些东西要声明。首先，大多数的门户各种各样的应用都有，因此比一些垂直或专业网站占点优势。第二，在这个表里没有各个分类的流量比例，就是说在一个分类有了比较多的网站不一定代表占的流量就比较多，但是在这个情况下够接近了。

So with all the disclaimers out of the way, there are interesting conclusions we can draw from this data, some expected, some not:

• 1) It seems definitive that China is much more entertainment based when compared to the US (especially when you take into the account the differences between portals and blog styles in the US and China)
• 2) As expected e-commerce is much more mature in the US, but I was taken aback by the Shanghai data. I believe it’s a clear sign that e-commerce will only get more popular in China
• 3) It surprised me that sites like Verizon, AT&T, and Bank of America made the list. I associate e-commerce with shopping online, but I didn’t realize that so many service transactions are done online
• 4) China website format is portal dominate
• 5) Not surprising with the IM vs email usage in China. I’d hazard to guess US is the exact reverse

Things not easily gleaned from this data

• 1) News portals – even though a lot of people read news online like people do in the US, it’s more entertainment focused here, the politically charged stuff you see on some US news sites really don’t exist
• 2) China blogs are more diary-like and US blogs are more topical
• 3) I believe the piracy issue is a factor in China being entertainment oriented, just not sure how much. I’d guess video and music consumption in China is 90% pirated content (full movies/entire seasons of tv shows, baidu mp3, etc). Of course pirated stuff is rampant on youtube and torrents in the US but not nearly the scale it is here. As another data point, user-generated videos going viral is a fairly infrequent occurrence here (just my gut feel)
• 4) Competition from other media outlets is a big contrast. In the US, teenagers still watch A LOT of tv (source: Nielsen Nielsen, but it seems as though less and less young people here watch broadcast TV (predominately because the programs are generally regarded as of lower quality vs what they can get on the internet). Thus, I believe this leads people to view the internet as their main entertainment outlet
• 5) Haggling holding back e-commerce? I believe that’s a reason why things like price comparison sites in China have a hard time, but again, this is slowly changing as prices become more and more transparent
• 6) There is significantly less information put online in China. As a management consultant in the US, I remember looking up lexisnexis or factiva for a lot of data, but very tough to do here. Information exchange happens more at a personal level here. I believe this too is changing, but slowly

After looking at this data, it raises more questions. Any thoughts?

• 1) Why is the portal format so popular here in China?
• 2) I feel like diversity of information online is wider in the US, it’s just a gut feel, but not sure how to go able validating that or what possible causes could be?

总结：

• 1) 看了这几个图表之后，美国的确比中国偏信息（尤其考虑到中美国的门户内容及博客风格的差异）
• 2) 据我猜测，网上购物在美国果然比较成熟但看到了上海的比例还是令我大吃一惊。我觉得这个明显的表示网上购物肯定会越来越普及
• 3) 没料到Verizon, AT&T, and Bank of America会排得上名。 虽然我知道美国人经常在网上购物，没想到那么多人会在网上办手续
• 4) 美国网站的形式比较分散
• 5) 即时通信对电子邮箱 – 在美国我估计是倒过来的

有一些东西不容易在图里表示的：

• 1. 新闻门户 – 美国网民也一样的喜欢上网看新闻，不过内容还是有区别的。在一些美国网站很激烈的政治争论比较多
• 2. 博客在美国偏fixed topic，而在中国偏日记的形式
• 3. 在美国网上盗版的内容也很多（youtube, torrents）但还没到这边的程度。User Generated Content 相对来说还是多很多
• 4. 在美国电视的竞争力很强。 在美国很多青少年整天还是在看电视（来源：Nielsen ）而越来越多，在这边反而是颠倒。我发觉越来越少中国青少年在看电视，渐渐这个娱乐渠道由互联网来代替的
• 5. 美国人没有讨价还价的习惯 – 我认为这点是为什么在美国价格对比以及购物网站有办法做的起来的重大因素之一
• 6. 信息挂在互联网的习惯。 我记得在美国做咨询顾问的时候，要收集资料很简单，上一些网站比如lexisnexis, factiva, hoovers, 等等就很容易解决了。 这边我发觉大多数的信息还是通过个人关系所获到得。

最后做了这个分析，收获还是不少的，但是让我想到更多问题。 如果你有什么想法，请你跟大家分享一下

• 1. 为什么门户的形式那么普及？ 这点我有一点不太理解。不是说这边网站少，就是基本上都是为门户的形式
• 2. 个人感觉美国互联网的内容比较分散，各种各样的奇奇怪怪的网站都有，不知道怎么证明或因素会是什么

来了中国之前不知道wordpress访问不到。。。发现了越来越多中国的读者，因此我终于注册了自己的域名和空间。如果你是用阅读器的话应该会自动redirect到http://meiguanxiblog.com。 如果不行的话，可能要重新订阅。。。不好意思！

“All the girls in our class had the biggest crush on boy xyz because he always got the best grades”

or equally classic

“I duped my wife to go out with me because I told her that I was in this prestigious physics competition. Actually， it was my little brother that was in the competition, not me.”

Hey…I don’t see any hands?!? But yes, true accounts told to me by some of my friends here!

It got me thinking, what if overnight, smarts really became the new cool? And the ‘popular’ kids in school were the smartest ones in school? Far-fetched I know, but it makes me wonder what kind of people we’d be churning out instead.

———————————————-
说实话，来了中国之后我听到几句话让我大吃一惊。。。

“在我们班里，很多女孩都喜欢上莫莫男孩因为他读书都很棒！” 或者
“当时我老婆愿意跟我交往是因为我跟她说我参加了莫莫全国物理大赛，其实不是我，而是我弟弟！ ”

第二句可能有一点夸张不过我的意思是在美国少数人会这样说（至少如果他这样说人家都会取笑他）。 小时候，受不受别人关注（无论同学或家长），运动好远远超过成绩好。 反而，有时候成绩好的学生会被别的学生排斥。哇，观点确实不一样。。。