The Purpose of Research

Today is nice. Maybe 70 degrees outside, it's the first day I've been able to hang my clothes outside to dry. There's hardly any pollution and nary a cloud in the sky. Beautiful day, but I'm stuck inside doing research on theoretical linguistics reading scanned in texts from books written when my parents were infants (or before) that combine language study with psychology and mathematics. A sample is as follows:

Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) operates with two basic operations, Merge and Move. Although there is current debate on exactly how Move is to be formulated, the differences between the current proposals are minute. The following discussion follows Chomsky's original proposal. Merge is a function that takes two objects (say α and β) and merges them into an unordered set with a label (either α or β, in this case α). The label identifies the properties of the phrase.

Merge (α, β) → {α, {α, β}}

For example, Merge can operate on the lexical items 'drink' and 'water' to give 'drink water'. Note that the phrase 'drink water' behaves more like the verb 'drink' than like the noun 'water'. That is, wherever we can put the verb 'drink' we can also put the phrase 'drink water'. This can be represented in the algorithm:

X NP AUX Y => X AUX NP Y

(where NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)

Yeah, as you can tell, it's riveting reading.
So as I was sitting here trying to stay awake and desperately avoid distractions (like this one) I was inevitably wondering why I'm doing this. I mean, I never recall seeing Chomsky's notes on mathematical linguistics on any recruiting poster for ESEC. Then, I had a thought. Since being over here, I've firmly established that I want to be in the field of education as my career. This revelation may have came thousands of dollars and five or six years after it should, but I'm just happy to have that figured out now. Eventually, sometime in the future (don't press me for details, because your guess is as good as mine) I will return to the US permanently. Maybe in 2012 or 2016 or anytime in between when government for, and, of and by the people is restored. When this happens I'd like to get my Masters in Education, and I've discovered a few really nice schools that can offer this without too many digits before the comma (another distraction) and I figure all this reading, everything from the Audio-lingual Method to our guy Chomsky here will be in the curriculum. It will be nice to vaguely recognize some of the names and theories.
Also, should I pull off the impossible here and actually get this work finished and everything else goes according to plan, I will have helped to have write a book that will be part of a series of mandatory textbooks in Chinese universities. That looks darn good on a resume when applying to schools to teach. So that right now is what has been getting me through all this research.

Easter Update

I apologize for not having an update shortly after Easter, however it is the start of the new session and with that as well as still working for Dr. Yu, I have been a little distracted. Easter Sunday, nearly all of us went to Haidian for a really good message and dynamic worship service with well over one thousand people, mostly Chinese. The church showed bits of The Gospel of John in between hymns and it was incredibly powerful. Afterward, the church revealed a surprise. They had groups of volunteers hand painting 5,000 eggs individually with intricate detail, most with scripture references in flowing Chinese calligraphy. The eggs in the picture I have attached are not from the church, but come from an article in the China Daily. I tried to get a picture of these but have you ever seen an easter egg hunt among a thousand people? After you got an egg, the church wanted you to give it to anybody else in the city and tell them the reason for why. This was probably the best Easter for me in memory.

Prepare for Educational Principles!

As some of you know, I've been pretty sick the past few days. Fortunately, I'm feeling a little better today. As part of my down time, I've been going through lesson plans and educational theories as well as curriculum structure. I knew I needed to break from this when I started to watch 300 and automatically devised a lesson plan for the Persian messenger. The teacher is King Leonidas (on the left) and the Persian messenger (on the right.)

Lesson Plan
Objectives: After completing this lesson, the student will be able to:

• Identify that this is Sparta, not madness.
• Be able to find earth and water, using the teacher guided, self-discovery method.
• Understand and develop tolerances for the differences in other cultures and as a result become more sensitive to people who are different than him.
  

Lastly, the student will be able to

• Understand that showing off the skulls of conquered kings and insulting queens are not adequate ways of negotiating with foreign cities.
  

Video Tour of Campus

So this winter Riley and Geoff filmed some footage of our daily life in Beijing, China, and what its like living here. After a long time of not really doing anything with it, and since we're (or should I say, he's) on break now, Geoff compiled it so you could see from more of a "promotional" perspective of what goes on here. It's a pretty quick video, and it, unfortunately, leaves a lot of the details out, but I think it may help you get a better understanding of some of the things we do.

Oregon Team

The past two days we've had the blessing of having about 15 American high school kids from Oregon on spring break. They've been in country for a little while now but spent their last two days with us. It was very refreshing to see all these Americans (that we didn't know) come and be so willingly cheerful and helpful and anxious to do whatever manual labor we could find for them. A few of the girls spent their time on the mammoth and highly impossible task of making our community kitchen shine, even going so far as to put butcher paper on the walls in the "splatter zone." That idea was from the sweet little girl who spent her entire time on this campus trying to scrub down and remove the ancient mold and grease stains, some of which were older than her. All three of them who cleaned the kitchen did so with such smiles and singing, they were like three Cinderellas.
Other Oregon team members took on the most unenviable job of counting all our hand-outs and papers that we give to the students. In one session alone, it's a couple of thousand sheets of paper that we give out, all that need to be counted and sorted and clipped into piles of twenty. We used to do it ourselves, but the job grew to be so dreaded and so hated that we just ordered several thousand more copies than we needed, to make sure we never ran out. Over time, this got to be very disorganized and it required something slightly less than a full archaeological dig to find the hand-outs you needed. Not good when it's 7:45 and you've got class at 8.
The Oregon team happily accomplished the time consuming task of cleaning the supply room, which is where supplies went to die. For a while, we had a theory that there was a real life black hole in one corner sucking up objects stored in there. In two days, they had it cleaned, sorted and systematically organized, destroying the hopes of the black theorists.
After doing all this, then in the afternoons some of the guys would play basketball (mostly for the students entertainment, as four of the guys were well over six feet and no Chinese was brave enough to play against that) and everyone would have lively conversations at dinner with the students. They head back to America tomorrow, and we're sad to see them go. Some of them have expressed interest in coming back to be short term staff. We certainly hope so.

Just Keep In Mind

I've been following this healthcare deal in America pretty closely and while I am firmly against the implementation of such, I refuse to be of the doom and gloom variety. Most of my friends and the people I talk to are against it, a few are for it. The more I read, the more I see how some people view Obama as a great savior of modern America, while others see him as evil incarnate. Here's my view on the future...

Because the air quality is only NEARLY fatal...

This was a photo taken early this morning in Ningxia, in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Province of a nasty sandstorm. Visibility was limited to only a couple of thousand feet and the winds were blowing at an incredible 40 to 50 miles an hour. Can you imagine what kind of damage trillions of grains of sand blowing around at near hurricane speeds can do? How far could that sand blow over the course of a single night? 10 miles? 100 miles?

Try 800 to 1,000 miles. All the way to Beijing. In one night.

This morning when we woke up the sky was a sickly orange color and the wind was higher than normal. Coated over everything was a fine layer of gritty sand. The remnants of the sand storm in the mid-western provinces reached us overnight. When I stepped out, I could feel the grit in my mouth and the winds were sharper. However, by afternoon, the sky was normal (well for Beijing anyway), the fierce wind had died down and the only evidence was some residual sand stuck in between cobblestones on streets and corners where it was blown.