One of the most obvious signs of systemic cheating is that many Chinese officials use fake or dubiously acquired academic credentials to burnish their resumes.

The overwhelming majority of these officials end up receiving doctorates (a master’s degree won’t do anymore in this political arms race) granted through part-time programs or in the Communist Party’s training schools. Of the 250 members of provincial Communist Party standing committees, an elite group including party chiefs and governors, 60 claim to have earned PhDs.

Tellingly, only ten of them completed their doctoral studies before becoming government officials.

In fact, it sounds like these degrees are often empty status symbols, acquired by corrupt means and thereby not meaning much of anything. This should change the tenor of the comparisons from my previous post. (It may be that the very top tier leaders who I looked at previously do have genuine degrees, and it’s just the upper-mid bureaucracy where everything is bullshit; I don’t know enough.)

About the US, there was also this intriguing (but undocumented) comment on the MR post:

Ted Craig May 15, 2012 at 12:47 pm

“Tellingly, only ten of them completed their doctoral studies before becoming government officials.” Change that to law school and you have the same situation in the U.S. We’re not ruled by lawyers, as often bemoaned on this blog, but people with law degrees. Big difference.

Could it be that nominal lawyers in US gov’t are actually not real lawyers, and just got their degrees for signaling purposes? Does that bespeak a level of fakery similar to China’s?

What’s striking to me is that this was almost the perfect crime — reporter Rob Schmitz got suspicious and tracked down Daisey’s interpreter, who contradicted much of Daisey’s story. If Schmitz had not been able to get in touch with the interpreter, the fabrications might never have been revealed, and everyone would still believe what they heard.

The pressure to put out juicy stories is immense, and the facts are often hard to check. How many folks are getting away with lies just like this one, right now? How many complete fabrications are already part of the conventional wisdom?

UPDATE: The crime was even perfecter than I thought — Schmitz was able to track down the interpreter because he had worked with her himself — Daisey covered his tracks and it would’ve been hard to find the interpreter without the personal connection.

Everybody’s a critic. The bombing suspect Osuvwo, failing to appreciate the interrogation techniques in Abuja, collapsed and died.

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 5, 2012

There is a politics to these expressions, but it is implicit. The conventions of the self-created genre and the limitations of the Twitter medium mean there’s no room for explicit point-making. When he wants to make a point unmistakably, well, he’s done it twice so it’s a trend: he uses seven tweets in sequence. Today he said:

He previously said:

Probably a lot of cognitive work (especially repetitive and annoying work) can be reconfigured in this way, but the conversion is not as simple as “break into tasks, give out brownie points, profit.”

Is there a future for portable gaming?

The conventional wisdom increasingly says: “No.” The culprit is mobile gaming — in particular, games on the iPhone and to a lesser extent the iPad and on Android phones. The iPhone generates a case like the following against picking up a portable game console from Nintendo or Sony:

1. You have to carry a phone regardless. Carrying additional devices is annoying. Using your iPhone for games allows you to carry fewer devices.
2. Games cost like $1 on iPhone. Games for 3DS and Vita still cost $30 or $40. So instead of buying a 3DS game, you can just buy 30 iPhone games and spend a few minutes with each, or throw out the ones you don’t like, etc. etc.
3. Quick fun iPhone games are at least a decent substitute for anything you would want to play in a portable / mobile context. When you have time for bigger, meatier game experiences, you can just fire up your home PC / home console or whatever. Portable games consoles fill an in-between niche that’s not very important.

If any of these premises are vulnerable to attack, it is 3. An attack I haven’t seen elsewhere begins from the observation that portable games have always been, and continue to be, much more successful in Japan. I think a majority of Japanese households owned a Nintendo DS. The contrast to America is due at least in part to the different commuter cultures of the two countries. Japanese are more likely to live in cities where they commute by mass transit, are more likely to take trains between cities, etc., whereas Americans drive. A lot. A whole lot. The subway is great for portable gaming, but you shouldn’t try it while you’re driving.

These observations led me to the following crazy blue-sky idea: as self-driving cars become the norm in America, it will open up a whole lot more portable gaming time for people who used to be busy driving. We might then see a major revival of portable gaming in the US, instead of the usually-predicted decline. It depends on a lot of things, but the iPhonification of portable gaming may reverse itself yet.

Family Guy frequently makes reference to other TV shows as cultural touchstones. Last week’s episode has a joke about the skin colors of the cast of The Cosby Show. A frequent Family Guy opening gag has the family watching the TV while a parodic version of a real TV show plays. These parodies are often quite negative on the show portrayed. For example, in an episode from Season 2, the family watch a segment from Dharma and Greg, which is portrayed as vapid and stretching a stupid joke. I suspect there is lots of this kind of “intertextuality” in Family Guy, including a self-conscious stance on its position in the dialectic of sit coms about a family with an incompetent dad.

I may be missing a lot of this. I haven’t seen a lot of TV, and when Family Guy makes reference to some canonical show I have usually never seen it (possible exception: Law & Order).

Yet I still really like Family Guy, and in fact I think I like the TV parody segments quite a bit as well. These segments seem to be talking to someone who’s very TV-literate, but because of their negative tone and condescension, they also appeal to the TV-illiterate snob in me. I am left wondering which is the intended meaning / audience.

There is no prescriptivism. There is no descriptivism. These words don’t describe mutually exclusive opposed positions. If you try to define them rigorously you will not be able to cleanly distinguish them. I think we owe their vernacular ubiquity to the success of Language Log (note that I’m not claiming LL invented them).

“Prescriptivism” in particular is a kind of culture-war tag for a certain family of popular, non-professional language criticism, like “Eats Shoots and Leaves” or “The Elements of Style.” These works are often pedantic, and they often include stylistic pronouncements based on usage errors or false generalizations. Furthermore they often include a more-or-less explicit social conservatism (language was better in the good old days; it is okay to criticize poor people for deviating from Standard English). So the fit isn’t one-to-one, but I think it makes sense to think of “prescriptivism” as a label for a family of populist linguistic-conservate rhetoric.

If you are a blogger and linguist, then, you have at least three independent reasons to come out against “prescriptivism”:

1) Its practitioners are wrong on usage points.
2) It imports a conservative agenda.
3) It usurps professional privilege, because its practitioners are not trained as linguists.

I don’t think I’m being unfair in suggesting that all three of these reasons from time to time may motivate attacks on “prescriptivism.” And we can generalize 3) so that it applies not only to professional linguists but to educated liberal people generally:

3a) Prescriptivism represents vulgarity in the public sphere, because the uneducated and unsophisticated are usurping the privilege of the educated.

(Note that I think a lot of liberal criticism of populist conservatism takes this form — “that’s sexist, as you would realize if you’d taken Women’s Studies 101,” “that argument relies on Econ 101 reasoning.” This is part of the psychological appeal of painting the opposing masses as racist, as well. Part of the reason “but I’m not racist” is an unpersuasive argument is because it signals unsophistication. Conversely, theories of what kinds of behavior are racist or sexist have become at least formally more sophisticated over the decades, as the Republicans became the party of whites and anti-racism became the distinguishing social feature of liberals.)

So much for “prescriptivism.” The thing that bothers me about the culture-war usage of these terms, though, is that the activity of linguistic prescription gets subsumed under the label of the supposed thought-system of prescriptivism.

Prescription is merely the activity of offering guides or rules to language and usage; it doesn’t depend on those guides and rules having any metaphysical status. You don’t have to be a “prescriptivist” to see the value of prescription. For example, languagehat, no prescriptivist, can say:

Which is not to say I don’t appreciate the pleasure to be had in manipulating the traditional rules; you will notice I write according to them, and I make my living from them as well (I’m a copyeditor).

The job of a copy editor is in part linguistic prescription. Nor, I think, do prescriptions have to have high statistical validity as descriptive linguistics to be useful. It is even possible, for example, to like “The Elements of Style,” as I do, without any particular metaphysical commitments. I don’t want to stake my whole argument on this, but it has always seemed like a useful and witty book to me. Geoffrey Pullum (of Language Log) obviously hates it, but he sees it as a symbol of the hated class, prescriptivism, and that makes him a very uncharitable reader of it. Get away from this essentially political division and there is still much to appreciate.

In sum, I think the whole “prescriptivism”-”descriptivism” opposition is an example of the ways that bloggy communication and political self-segregation limit and impoverish our discourse. It’s a contrived distinction that makes it easy to signal your loyalties but harder to appreciate the world as it is. That’s a loss for all of us.

Whatever Bourdain’s personal faults, he is right as rain about how sleazy it is for Paula Deen to sponsor medical treatments for an ailment caused — not exclusively, but increasingly — by the same willfully self-destructive lifestyle she also sells on her Food Network shows and in her numerous cookbooks. The increase in type II diabetes incidence and increase in obesity rates is not accidental, and she makes money from both ends of this disease. That’s disgusting. (source)

Cf.

I’m fat and I’ve never made a single one of Paula Deen’s recipes. Who do I get to blame?

Is the contention seriously that Deen is tricking people into cooking her recipes by claiming that they are healthy? And then profiting by marketing Diabetes drugs to the victims of her nefarious scheme to hide the fact that butter has fat in it.

To be less snarky, I do not believe that a single person in the entire United States watches Deen’s show and thinks, “Wow, that looks like such a healthy meal!” (source)

UPDATE: apparently her deal is building cheeseburgers with donuts or something and calling it traditional southern cuisine. Not sure if this is hyperbole. (FURTHER.)

Naturally, a top-10 list is right out. But I did get to play a bunch of excellent games last year. I recommend all of the below basically without reservation. Did I only play great games in 2011? Well no but what’s the point of listing every forgettable iOS skinner box I put a few minutes (or hours) into?

EDIT: added a game I had forgotten — Portal 2.
EDIT EDIT: added Bastion!

EDIT! (March 21): I can’t believe I forgot about the Tactics Ogre remake, a near-perfect game and my favorite last year. I can be kinda scatterbrained.

1. SpaceChem (Mac, PC, iPad). A wonderful puzzle game that I have failed to adequately describe to like 10 different people. It’s a spatial programming game, reminiscent of the very old edugames where you soldered control circuits inside a robot’s head. The premise is that you are building factories (and eventually complex production lines) for assembling chemicals from other chemicals (a fictionalized chemistry prevails throughout). You do this by laying out on a grid instructions for “waldoes” that pick up and drop atoms. The waldoes follow their circuit and act on the instructions they pass over. You have to solve various engineering and programming problems that crop up along the way. I’m doing a terrible job here aren’t I? Here’s an explanation with pictures, from Matthew Gallant. I love this game; you should try it!
2. Jamestown (Mac, PC). This is a bullet-hell shooter with co-op, clever mechanics, and a precision-engineered learning curve, set on colonial Mars, circa 1619. I could say more but just check out this inspiring making-of piece.
3. The Binding Of Isaac (Mac, PC). Aesthetically, this is a twisted game that offends the sensibilities in countless ways. Procedurally, it’s a shooter with randomly generated levels based on the model of the dungeons from The Legend of Zelda (NES). The basic gameplay is a lot of fun, and the huge variety of power-ups and enemies means that each playthrough is a unique and probably wonderful story.
4. Atom Zombie Smasher (Mac, PC). Brendon Chung’s (Blendo Games’s) games make virtues of their limitations. Flotilla took low-poly ship models and free music, and mashed them up with cute animals and silly random encounters — somehow the whole just works. In Atom Zombie Smasher, play takes place on low-detail random city maps where yellow dots are civilians and purple dots are zombies, and this is just perfect. It’s a hectic real-time game about using ridiculously limited resources — just the one rescue chopper at first — to keep the civilians separate from the zombies and rescue as many as possible. The odds start out steep and get tougher throughout the campaign mode, which adds tools to your kit as the game progresses but mostly just conspires to screw you.
5. Ravenmark (iOS) is yet another take on the entry-level tactical war game, a la Advance Wars. It is beautifully put together and well designed. But it is most set apart by its choice of strategic emphasis. Advance Wars goes down the path of Warcraft et al., where you capture resources to build troops to etc. Other games become about character progression, leveling up etc. Ravenmark omits all those elements completely, so it can focus on formations and positioning. Almost nothing else matters. It makes for a fresh and challenging experience.
6. Super Meat Boy (Mac, PC, XBox). A huge compendium of very brief, very intense platforming challenges. It was brilliant to make the game this way, with each level a discrete challenge that might last 3 seconds or a couple minutes. I don’t know if this approach has ever been applied with so much ambition (maybe in N, the ninja platformer); it works great.
7. Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions (iPhone). I forgot I played this game this year, despite getting more than halfway through the game, basically playing through to the bits where the game’s momentum wears out. I’ve played Final Fantasy Tactics before, long ago on Playstation — this game is a port of a port of the 1997 original. It’s funny, I love this game, but after a while it becomes wearying. The vivid characters and conflicts of the opening chapters give way to repetitive story-telling, the proliferation of heroes and villains just-because. And the game parts start to feel same-y, as you’re not unlocking as much new stuff. The difficulty of battles oscillates between too easy and too hard. There’s a lot here for dedicated completists, but the sheer labor involved in tweaking and minmaxing your fighters is exhausting to me. Lots of random battles, lots of menu manipulation. If you’re serious you’ll spend a lot of time beating up your own guys for experience points. It doesn’t help that the iPhone port is careless in many ways. FFT remains probably my favorite video game story, but it’s possible I will never play it again.
8. Portal 2 (Mac, PC, PS3). I loved Portal and would have been thrilled with more of the same. The new puzzle elements add some dynamism to the environment, which is great. As to the story and general chrome plate, I don’t particularly care. There are some people who think the story was done really well; it struck me as more cliched and less interesting than the original. But this was a fun several hours. I recently tried to get into the co-op with a friend who never played Portal; for those purposes the learning curve is a little steep, and we got trapped more than once in broken states where it was impossible to progress and we had to restart the game. Sigh.
9. Bastion (XBox, PC). Bastion was a really cool game, a 2D “action RPG” (kinda like Zelda) with the isometric Japanesey visual style of a Disgaea game. The blockbuster feature of this game is its dynamic narration — as the action unfolds, a weary cowboy gives his interpretation of what you’re doing on-screen, or sometimes just spins a yarn about something. The narrator turns out to be a character in the story as well, and there’s just enough unstable and surprising in this candy-colored post-apocalypse to keep it interesting throughout. Meanwhile the action is tight and satisfying, varied and tough. I beat this game and did about a quarter of a second playthrough.