Deceased--Yutu

"Farewell to Yutu"

by

Morris Jones

February 12th, 2014

SPACE DAILY

 By now, it seems almost certain that China's Yutu Moon rover has died a premature death in the cold lunar night. The rover has been exposed to sunlight for a few days, and there has been no word of it waking up.

Yutu was carried to the Moon aboard China's Chang'e-3 Moon lander, a boxy structure reminiscent of the base of an Apollo lunar lander from the 1960s. Chang'e-3 made history by becoming China's first mission to land on the Moon, and the first object to softly land there in more than three decades.

Yutu's problems began roughly three weeks ago when a solar panel failed to fold inwards over the rover's body, just before night fell at the rover's landing site. The folding panel was designed to protect the rover's interior during the two-week lunar night, by trapping heat from a radioisotope source. Without this protection, the rover's electronics have apparently frozen.

China had originally expected Yutu to function for roughly three months. The failure of Yutu after less than a month of nominal surface operations is a disappointment.

Apart from mourning its loss, the major priority for China's space program will be conducting a post-mortem for Yutu. It is vital to know how it malfunctioned. Fortunately, there seems to be a lot of data that was obtained before night fell.

We know that the solar panel did not close. We can easily deduce how this affected the thermal protection for the rover. Much work will need to be performed to work out exactly why this mechanical failure occurred in the first place.

Moving parts are always tricky for spacecraft. Getting them to work on the Moon is even more difficult. Apart from the vicious cycles of heat and cold, there is the ever present problem of dust. We do not know if the hinges were jammed by dust, or if there was a failure of the motors or mechanisms designed to close the panel for some other reason. Lubricant could have been worn away from some part, causing friction or even a "cold welding" of metal surfaces in a vacuum. China will probably be conducting simulations to determine the most likely cause.

With Yutu's case file certain to close in the near future, it will be time to consider the fate of China's next Moon mission. China has already built a back-up lander, dubbed Chang'e-4, which it planned to launch in a few years. This is a typical strategy of China's lunar exploration program: Two identical spacecraft are built in case one fails.

China's first lunar mission, Chang'e-1, was launched to orbit the Moon in 2007. The mission was a complete success. Thus, China decided that its back-up spacecraft, Chang'e-2, would not precisely repeat its predecessor's mission. It was launched in 2010 with a more powerful rocket that helped the spacecraft to save its fuel reserves. Chang'e-2 was sent on a shorter mission to the Moon and then flown into deep space to fly past the asteroid Toutatis.

This time, China will probably need to use the back-up lander to repeat the tasks that Chang'e-3 failed to complete. There will probably be an overview of the design of some of its most critical components, to strengthen them against failure.

This analyst expects that China will want to land a second rover with this mission, but we can expect that it will be thoroughly overhauled. China will want to ensure that the solar panel will not fail again, and will probably look for other potential problems. The next rover will probably look the same as Yutu but it will be improved.

Exactly when Chang'e-4 will launch is unclear. The problems experienced by this latest mission suggest that China will want to take a fair amount of time for troubleshooting, redesign and testing. Any previous speculation on the approximate launch time is probably no longer reliable.

We will need to wait for China to advertise a new launch timetable. In turn, this could affect the fate of the two lunar landers that are expected to come after Chang'e-4. These missions, dubbed Chang'e-5 and 6, are sample-return missions. It could take longer to launch them, and their design could be revised in the wake of the Yutu investigations.

Whatever China does with its second rover, one change should be suggested. The rover needs a new name. China should remember that saying "Yutu 2" in English sounds stranger than it does in Chinese!

A different Thanksgiving

"My Thanksgiving at a KFC in China"

by

Matt Schiavenza

November 27th. 2013

The Atlantic

In the late summer of 2004, days before I was to move to Lianyungang, China, to teach English for a year, I spoke to an acquaintance who had spent a few years in the country.

"Holidays are hard," he said. "But oddly, not so much Christmas. Christmas isn't that bad. It's Thanksgiving that's hard."

At the time, surviving the holidays was the least of my worries. I was moving to a country where I didn't speak the language, understand the culture, or know the history, in order to do a job that I had never done and didn't know how to do. And not only that, I was going to a city—Lianyungang—that I hadn't even heard of, and could find no information about online.

Other than that, I was completely prepared.

***

Lianyungang, 300 miles or so north of Shanghai, is a port city of around 750,000 people and is famous in China for being the birthplace of the Monkey King, a literary hero from the 16th century novel Journey to the West. But in 2004, it looked like any other city in the country: full of tall, gray skyscrapers, neon signs, and belching taxis.

Foreign residents in Lianyungang were few and far between. I was told that the first English teacher arrived in 2000 and when she—a middle-aged New Zealander with white hair—walked around, bicyclists sometimes slammed into parked cars. By the time I arrived four years later, there were about ten Western teachers in the city, but we still caused a minor frenzy when we ventured into a crowd of people. 

Usually, there were the "hellos": Young Chinese people would shout the word, accompanied by peals of laughter, as I walked in the city. Other people would tail me and ask for my phone number or address. Once, when walking through a university campus, I attracted a small mob of people who, wishing to practice their English, bombarded me with questions.

"Do you like Chinese food?" "Can you use chopsticks?"

Yes, and yes—we have them at home.

"What is your favorite Chinese city?"

"Uh, Lianyungang." Except for a few hours in Beijing on the day I arrived, I hadn't been anywhere else.

"Really?"

***

Within a couple of months, the euphoria of being in China had worn off, and I found myself settling into a routine. During the day, there was work: I taught two hour-long classes of 15 and 16-year-olds, and, because I assigned no homework and rarely gave out tests, spent the afternoons either reading or making a halfhearted attempt to learn Chinese.

At night, after dinner at my school's canteen, I'd walk to a store down the street and buy a pirated DVD, which usually cost about 50 cents. The quality of the copies were variable—sometimes, they were filmed with a camcorder inside a cinema, which worked okay until someone stood up in front—but watching them kept me from having to deal with my Chinese reality. I was desperately homesick. "Just get through this year," I told myself. "Then you can leave."

When Thanksgiving came around, I decided it'd be easiest if I just ignored it. In China, this isn't difficult; unlike Christmas, which many Chinese people commemorate with decorations, music, and festivities, Thanksgiving slips past unnoticed—it's just another Thursday.

And so it was. I walked to school, taught my classes, did some lesson planning, and came home. But as I sat on my sofa, watching the next film from the James Bond box set I bought for $12 at a local shop, I felt a sense of shame. What was I doing? It was Thanksgiving, damn it. I needed to have a proper Thanksgiving dinner.

There was only one problem. In Lianyungang, as in most small Chinese cities, there's no turkey. Or cranberry sauce. Or stuffing, yams, pumpkin pie, or anything else. In fact, in the entire city of 700,000 people, there was exactly one restaurant whose food even resembled, at a distance, Thanksgiving fare.

Kentucky Fried Chicken.

And so that's where I headed.

Lianyungang's one KFC was located near my school, but until then I had refused, in an effort to preserve a degree of cultural authenticity, to go in. But on Thanksgiving, after I waved hello to Colonel Sanders and walked through the front door, what I found was a revelation. Unlike any of the other restaurants I had been to in town, KFC had clean floors, a functional public bathroom, and central heat. Its patrons were smartly dressed young professionals. Several people, I noticed, were even there on dates. The line behind the cash register was orderly, and within minutes of my arrival I found myself in possession of a bucket of crispy fried chicken, a tub of mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and a dubious-looking "dinner wrap" I selected from the menu.

I pinched myself. Was this China?

I sat down and tore into my food. Every last bite was delicious. About halfway through the meal, I felt the familiar wave of nausea—tinged with self-loathing— I recognized from a lifetime of eating fast food. But I didn't care. It was Thanksgiving, and I wanted my food coma.

As I left, walking to a busy street to look for a cab, I heard footsteps and turned around: A young man wearing a suit had followed me from the restaurant and wanted to tell me something. Oh God. What did he want?

"Happy Thanksgiving!" he said. "I hope you have a good day."

With that, he turned around and ran off. And my first Thanksgiving in China—there would be five more—was complete. More complete than I would have imagined it being in Lianyungang, anyway.

Deceased--Fang Lizhi

Fang Lizhi
February 12th, 1936 to April 6th, 2012

"Fang Lizhi, Chinese Physicist and Seminal Dissident, Dies at 76"

b7y

Michael Wines

April 7th, 2012

The New York Times

Fang Lizhi, whose advocacy of economic and democratic freedoms shaped China’s brief era of student dissent that ended with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and his exile, died on Friday in Tucson, Ariz., his son, Fang Ke, said Saturday.

Mr. Fang was 76. The cause of death was not known, his son said in a telephone interview.

A brilliant scientist — and in his early years a loyal member of the Communist Party — Mr. Fang had become China’s best-known dissident by the 1980s, his views shaped by persecution in China and exposure to Western political concepts abroad.

In early 1989, he published an open letter to China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, calling for the release of political prisoners. The letter helped galvanize a pro-democracy student movement that spring, peaking on June 4, when Chinese troops killed hundreds of student protesters among the masses occupying Tiananmen Square.

Fearing arrest, Mr. Fang sought refuge with his family at the United States Embassy in Beijing. President George Bush’s decision to grant him protection there provoked a yearlong diplomatic standoff with the Chinese that ended, after secret negotiations, with a decision by Chinese leaders in June 1990 to allow the family to leave China, ostensibly for medical treatment.

Mr. Fang later became a professor of physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he taught and continued to speak out on human rights until his death.

Word of his death initially spread on Twitter, where veterans of the 1989 democracy movement mourned his passing and proposed a rights award in his honor.

“No words can express my grief,” wrote Wang Dan, who was imprisoned for four years for his leadership role in the Tiananmen protests. “Fang Lizhi has inspired the ’89 generation and has awakened the people’s yearning for human rights and democracy.”

Mr. Fang’s willingness to test the boundaries of his eventual academic discipline, the physics of the universe, seemed foreshadowed even at an early age by his penchant for questioning authority.

Born in 1936 to a Hangzhou postal clerk and his wife, Mr. Fang entered the prestigious Beijing University as a youth and excelled in physics. According to a 1988 article in The Atlantic Monthly, he quickly flouted official norms, taking over a founding meeting of the university’s Communist Youth League and urging students to think independently instead of accepting party dogma on proper academic behavior.

He joined China’s Institute of Modern Physics after graduating in 1956, only to be expelled from the Communist Party a year later during Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign, a movement against intellectuals and others who were seen to have strayed from Communist principles. His offense was writing an essay criticizing political interference in scientific research.

Mr. Fang was considered too valuable to allow party censure to affect his work, and he continued to rise in academia. But when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he was again persecuted, first imprisoned and then sent to rural Anhui Province to work with peasants. He carried with him but one book, on astrophysics, and his repeated readings of it led him to change his research focus from fundamental physics to cosmology.

Still an outcast, he continued to flout convention. In 1972, Mr. Fang and colleagues at Anhui’s branch of the University of Science and Technology of China published a paper titled “A Solution of the Cosmological Equations in Scalar-Tensor Theory, with Mass and Blackbody Radiation.”

“This innocuous-sounding article met with a furious response from leading theoretical circles of the party,” The China Quarterly recounted in a 1990 article. “Fang et al. had broken a longstanding taboo by introducing the Big Bang theory to the Chinese physics world. Insofar as the Big Bang contradicted Engels’s declaration that the universe must be infinite in space and time, Fang’s paper was tantamount to heresy.”

Like most of the persecuted, Mr. Fang was rehabilitated after Mao’s death in 1976, and in Deng’s more open China he traveled to conferences abroad, earning a worldwide scientific reputation. But his exposure to foreign political concepts sharpened his doubts about the Communist system, and he began to write and lecture on its shortcomings.

During a brief flowering of political openness, he gained a large following in China and abroad for his outspoken criticism of the Communist system. But in January 1987, after he helped organize pro-reform student demonstrations in cities across China, he was again expelled from the party and stripped of his job as vice president of Anhui University of Science and Technology.

Anger over the demonstrations among Communist Politburo members forced the resignation days later of Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded party general secretary, who had presided over the period of openness. Mr. Hu’s death in April 1989 set off the final round of student protests that ended with the occupation of Tiananmen Square and the subsequent assault on the demonstrators.

Freedom did not change Mr. Fang’s disregard for authority. Not long after leaving the American Embassy for the West, he angered his host, James Lilley, the American ambassador to China, by publicly accusing the United States of holding China to a lower human rights standard than it applied to the Soviet Union and its treatment of dissidents. The charge prompted a brisk response from President Bush, who said Mr. Fang’s views were mistaken and outdated.

But Mr. Fang consistently reserved his sharpest criticism for his homeland.

“Human rights are fundamental privileges that people have from birth, such as the right to think and be educated, the right to marry, and so on. But we Chinese consider those rights dangerous,” he said 26 years ago in a speech to students at Tongji University in Shanghai.

“If we are the democratic country we say we are, these rights should be stronger here than elsewhere. But at present they are nothing more than an abstract idea.”

See the following for more and an interview...

Fang Lizhi...science and politics=volatile mix

Chinese scale models...Tiangong

"Toys for Tiangong"

by

Morris Jones

August 9th, 2011

Space Daily

Wanna buy a spaceship? No, you can't have the real thing. But you can buy a model at a reasonable price. That's been the driving force behind a strongly entrenched space modeling industry for decades.

How many thousands of scale-model American space shuttles have been sold for every real one that was produced? What about the Apollo lunar module?

China also produces models of its own space hardware. The nation has a well-established modeling industry that pumps out plastic kits of tanks, ships and planes, in addition to replicas of their own rockets and Shenzhou spacecraft.

China also sells more impressive (and more expensive) models of its spacecraft in shiny metal. There are variants to show the different designs of different missions, such as Shenzhous 5, 6, and 7. All are depicted in fairly good technical detail.

You can also get models of the Chang'e 1 lunar orbiter, also made in metal. They make nice desktop ornaments. Then there's the cheap plastic Long March 2F launch vehicle that's actually a pen. Pull off the payload fairing, and start writing!

Now to Tiangong, China's new space laboratory. It would be nice to add a model of this spacecraft to my collection. So far, the Chinese aren't selling them. I wonder why.

Tiangong was announced years ago. The basic design has been on the record for a long time. China is committed to launching this spacecraft. It's about time we could get an official replica.

It could be the case that China is waiting for a successful launch before it sells models of Tiangong. If so, we hopefully won't have too long to wait. But what if they don't appear?

There could be another explanation. Perhaps people just aren't buying enough space models to justify the production costs. China produces very nice models of its space hardware for exhibitions.

These models are individually crafted, and probably quite expensive to produce. But you can justify the cost by producing small numbers, and re-using them for different exhibitions in different places.

Mass-production of cheaper models would require large sales. Does China expect a rush in demand for Tiangong models or toys?

If sales of earlier model spacecraft were not large, it could have deterred China from producing more models. There's no easy way to get reliable data on this, or know what is really going on. But it's plausible.

There will almost certainly be commemorative coins, stamps and buttons to celebrate the launch of Tiangong. Dedicated collectors will snap up this paraphernalia. But will Tiangong resonate with the general public? There will be plenty of people who would love a model of Tiangong, both inside and outside of China. I hope we can get them soon.


Vintage model kits...space oriented

Morris Jones and Chinese space efforts

This is the wave of the future...not run by NASA but world-wide players.

"My Decade with Shenzhou"

by

Morris Jones

August 3rd, 2009

SpaceDaily

2009 will mostly be remembered by space enthusiasts as the 40th anniversary of the first Moonwalk. For me, there's a second but more personal anniversary. I'm celebrating ten years of watching China's exciting buy mysterious human spaceflight program. This has not been an easy or a conventional task, but it's certainly been rewarding. China launched its Shenzhou 1 spacecraft in 1999, publically kicking off a program that has preoccupied me ever since.

China has conducted its Shenzhou spaceflight program behind a fairly tight veil of secrecy, and has offered few glimpses of its work to the outside world. Older spacewatchers would remember the problems of watching the Soviet Union's space program in the 1960s, where successes would be triumphantly splashed across news headlines, and failures concealed. General details on spacecraft design and mission planning were scarce.

Plans for landing a Soviet cosmonaut on the Moon were very well suppressed, and it took decades of research for the full story to be unveiled. For someone like me, who missed the 1960s and the Moonlanding, watching China has given me a chance to experience the same excitement and frustrations as an earlier generation of spacewatchers.

I've published dozens of articles on the Shenzhou program in publications such as SpaceDaily, and other news sources. I've also fielded a lot of inquiries from other journalists bedeviled by the same problems I have experienced, namely, the lack of easy access to information and sources inside China.

I haven't had much to work with. Most of my information comes from open-source literature, mostly published by the Chinese themselves. I have never had a "Deep Throat" source within China, contrary to the beliefs of some of my readers. Nobody from any external intelligence agency leaks things to me, either.

I have used speculation and deductive reasoning to fill in the blanks, sometimes missing the mark, sometimes not. The need to solve puzzles makes this more interesting to an inquiring mind than some forms of reporting, but it can also leave you shrugging your shoulders.

There's another beef to get off my chest. The Chinese space program moves slowly. Very slowly. During the first test flights, delays in excess of a year could be found between some missions. There would be very little discussion of the program in Chinese media sources during these gaps. This was frustrating to watch, but it also raised serious doubts about the state of the program in my mind.

Would the Chinese government cancel the Shenzhou program, just as it cancelled China's first attempt at human spaceflight in the 1970s? Gradually, we have all grown used to the delays and the drawn-out plans, which have seen intervals of roughly three years between astronaut launches.

Science fiction writers have long toyed with the idea of devices that accelerate or slow down time, like watching a video on fast-forward. I have often thought that such a device would be useful for watching China's space program. The slow pace of activities makes it very difficult for anyone to cover it as a dedicated reporting round, and nobody can build a full-time career around watching Shenzhou. This has probably deterred many journalists from getting involved.

Some mysteries have been solved over the years as missions finally flew, but some questions have never been properly answered. We still haven't had a solid technical overview of the Shenzhou spacecraft, or other elements of China's space hardware.

Judging from photography in Chinese media outlets, the influence of Russian technology on everything from the shape of the spacecraft to the design of China's spacesuits seems to be profound, but China still won't say how far it really goes. Nobody has explained how and why a series of heavily doctored photos of the Long March 2F rocket, used to launch Shenzhou, were leaked onto the Internet in 1999 before China officially revealed the program. We still don't know exactly what happened to Shenzhou 2, an unmanned test mission that apparently crashed on landing.

The activities performed by the crew of Shenzhou 6, widely suspected to have been photo-reconnaissance, remain unofficially documented. Rumours of technical problems during the flights of Shenzhou 5 (the first manned mission) and Shenzhou 6 have not been dispelled.

The lack of official access to the Shenzhou program has long highlighted a paradox in China's spaceflight strategy. The nation clearly craves recognition and admiration for its feats in space, but blocks so many pathways to promoting it. China's state-run media explains the program to its own citizens, but anecdotal reports I have received from visitors to China suggest that awareness is generally low.

The Chinese public cannot generally name their first astronaut or the spaceship that carried him. Outside of China, awareness of Shenzhou is even lower. China also engenders suspicion among international observers through its lack of transparency, suspicion that could well be justified in some cases.

This unusual lack of information has also created some interesting experiences for me. It's fun to take phone calls from international reporters about Shenzhou. It's even more fun when the reporters are calling me in Sydney, Australia, and they're based in Beijing! Being physically close to the story doesn't grant you any more access. I have also done interviews with magazines, radio and television networks based in Hong Kong and China, who should have an easier time than foreign wire service reporters.

The problem of revealing "state secrets", a very fluid concept in China, is probably enough to scare many Chinese reporters. Problems could appear for a journalist who talks to an engineer, and accidentally reveals something previously unrevealed. But quoting a foreigner who has already published his own material is probably safer.

This is an interesting time to be watching China. America's space program is in a state of flux, and is going through a very public dissection of its problems. Plans for returning American astronauts to the Moon seem to be open to question, with sources suggesting that the original plan for a 2020 landing are unrealistic. China has been relatively quiet in its recent statements, but has not concealed its desire to send its own astronauts to the Moon.

Generally ignored by the world, the Chinese space program will grow more important in the future, and its progress will probably cause alarm bells in Washington. As difficult as it is, I will have plenty of reason to keep watching the Chinese space program in the future.

China and academic plagiarism

Is China getting soft on [academic] crime?

"It's plagiarism, all over again"

by

Chen Jia

June 17th, 2009

China Daily

A major university in Beijing has thrown a student out of its doctorate course for plagiarizing a research paper and smearing a vice headmaster's name in the process, in the latest case to mar academia in the country.

Beijing Normal University student Yang Lun, a PhD candidate in the school's philosophy and social science institute, plagiarized more than 80 percent of another researcher's work and published it in the leading Philosophy Research monthly in April, according to the Oriental Morning Post Tuesday.

Yang's tutor, Liaoning University vice headmaster Lu Jierong, was also disgraced as his name was on the plagiarized work, the paper's original author said.

"Their behavior deeply hurt me and tainted the country's academic landscape," said Wang Lingyun, a lecturer at Yunnan University in Yunnan province.

"They only revised a few sentences at the paper's beginning and summary part, and added some footnotes and references," he said.

The copycat case is among the growing number of plagiarized papers colleges have identified from students or professors.

In March, an associate professor at Zhejiang University's college of Pharmaceutical Science reportedly wrote eight theses by plagiarizing the research result from a former doctoral supervisor.

In the latest case, Wang said he wrote the plagiarized paper in 2002 and used it in a public lecture. Academic websites have also published the paper, he said.

He found the plagiarized paper last Friday, and asked the two to apologize to him in the media.

He also demanded financial compensation, though he didn't reveal how much money he planned to ask for.

Yang has apologized to him over the phone, and said he signed his tutor's name on the paper as it was hard for a student to publish a paper in a core academic magazine.

"My tutor helped revise the paper, but he didn't know I published it with his name," he said.

Yang said he didn't think he would be caught. "I have felt upset every day since it was published in the magazine."

The magazine and Lu both refused comment Tuesday.

Huo Qingwen, an education expert at Beijing Foreign Studies University's language education testing service, Tuesday said some students take chances due to their lack of awareness of academic discipline and loose surveillance from their tutors.

Xu Mei, the spokeswomen of the Ministry of Education, earlier said that universities should handle these kinds of cases in a fair and open way, and order institutes to set up workshops for teachers and students to improve the awareness of academic discipline.

A national supervision committee was established in 2006 to curb violations of academic rights in social sciences, while the Ministry of Science and Technology also founded a new organization to supervise the financial integrity and efficiency of State-level programs.

China..."1984" style?

"China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs"

by

Andrew Jacobs

June 9th, 2009

The New York Times

BEIJING — China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet.

The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC's starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.

The rules, issued last month, ratchet up Internet restrictions already among the most stringent in the world. China regularly blocks Web sites that discuss the Dalai Lama, the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters, and the Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement. But free-speech advocates say they fear the new software could make it even more difficult for China’s 300 million Internet users to access uncensored news and information.

"This is a very bad thing," said Charles Mok, chairman of the Internet Society, an advocacy group in Hong Kong. "It's like downloading spyware onto your computer, but the government is the spy."

Details of the new regulations, posted Monday on a government Web site, were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Called "Green Dam" — green being a foil to the yellow smut of pornography — the software is designed to filter out sexually explicit images and words, according to the company that designed it. Computer experts, however, warn that once installed, the software could be directed to block all manner of content or allow the government to monitor Internet use and collect personal information.

PC makers who serve the Chinese market, among them Dell, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, said they were studying the new rules and declined to comment. But privately, industry executives in the United States said they were upset by the new rules, which were issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology with no consultation and no advance warning. Beyond the nettlesome issue of abetting government censorship, they said six weeks was not enough time to shift production on such a large scale. "Many of us are going to take it in the neck with this mandate," said one executive. "It has put people into five-alarm mode."

More than 40 million personal computers were sold last year in China, one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Despite the slowing economy, industry analysts expect that figure to rise by 3 percent this year.

A group of industry representatives met with American officials Monday to express their displeasure with the new rules, said Susan Stevenson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. "We view any attempt to restrict the free flow of information with great concern," she said.

Zhang Chenming, whose company, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, helped create Green Dam, said concerns that the software could be used to censor a broad range of content or monitor Internet use were overblown. He insisted that the software, which neutralizes programs designed to override China's so-called Great Firewall, could simply be deleted or temporarily turned off by the user. "A parent can still use this computer to go to porn," he said.

Although the directive is somewhat imprecise and suggests that manufacturers can provide the software as a compact disc, it also says that it must be installed on computer hard drives as a backup file.

"The wording may be intentionally vague but the message is clear: we have no choice in the matter," said one computer executive.

Industry experts and civil libertarians say they are worried the software may simply be a Trojan horse for greater Internet control. The software developers have ties to China's military and public security agencies, they point out, and that Green Dam boasts that the project has the backing of Li Changchun, the country’s chief propaganda official and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party

The software will be provided free, paid for by the government, and according to the official Green Dam website it has already been downloaded 3.2 million times. That number includes thousands of schools that were required to install the software by the end of May. The site claims that Chinese manufacturers, including Lenovo, Inspur and Hedy, have already agreed to install 52 million sets of the software on new computers.

In recent months China has tightened its Internet restrictions, including an "anti-vulgarity" campaign that has closed down thousands of pornographic sites but also shuttered nonsexual sites, including some of the most popular bulletin boards and blog hosts. China already employs more than 30,000 censors and thousands who "guide public opinion" by flooding bulletin boards with comments favorable to the Communist Party.

Last week, as the 20th anniversary of the military crackdown on Tiananmen approached, the government blocked a host of Internet services, including Twitter, Microsoft’s live.com, and Flickr, a photo- sharing site. Youtube has been inaccessible here since March.

This is not the first time that foreign companies have been enlisted in government efforts to police the Internet. Google already blacks out politically sensitive results yielded by its popular search engine, Microsoft allows censors to block content on its blog service and Yahoo was widely criticized for turning over information that was used to jail a journalist.

Even beyond ethical concerns, those who have tested the new software describe it as technically flawed. One American software engineer said it leads machines to frequently crash. Others worry that it could leave millions of computers vulnerable to hackers. So far, at least, there is no version for the Apple and Linux operating systems.

On Monday, Green Dam's own website offered a hint of discontent over the filtering software. On the bulletin board section of the site, several users complained that pornographic images slipped through or that their computers had become painfully slow. "It seems pretty lousy so far," read one posting. "It's not very powerful, I can't surf the Internet normally and it’s affecting the operation of other software."

By Monday night, however, most of the comments had been deleted.


2+2=5

Good thing...bad thing--Chinese recycling

"Good thing"--less human exposure to toxic materials; "bad thing"...human livelihoods diminished. It also means that e-scrap, for example, will be junked by other means.

"China's Big Recycling Market Is Sagging"

by

Dan Levin

March 12th, 2009

The New York Times

BEIJING — Each morning Tian Wengui emerges from the home he makes under a bridge here, two large sacks slung over his shoulder. Through the day, and well into the night, he scours garbage cans for soda bottles, soy sauce containers and cooking oil jugs. Selling the refuse to one of Beijing's ubiquitous recycling depots, Mr. Tian can earn $3 on a good day.

But good days are getting harder to come by.

Since Mr. Tian migrated from Sichuan province, the multibillion-dollar recycling industry has gone into a nosedive because of the global economic crisis and a concomitant fall in commodity prices. Bottles now sell for half of what they did in the summer.

"Even trash has become worthless," Mr. Tian said recently as he made his way to a collection center, his sacks nearly bursting.

The collapse of the recycling business has affected people like Mr. Tian, the middlemen who buy the waste products and the factories that refashion the recyclable waste into products bound for stores and construction sites around the world. American and European waste dealers who sell to China are finding that their shipments are being refused by clients when they arrive in Asia.

The ultimate victim may be the environment, already overrun with enough trash in places to threaten people's health, now further burdened with refuse that until recently would have been recycled.

The effect is being felt acutely in China, the world's largest garbage importer. The United States, for example, exported 11.6 million tons of recovered paper and cardboard last year to China, up from 2.1 million tons in 2000, according to the American Forest and Paper Association.

Because Chinese consumption is far less developed than the West’s, more than 70 percent of the materials that feed the country’s recycling industry must come from abroad, said Wang Yonggang, a spokesman for the China National Resources Recycling Association.

"Chinese tradition is all about saving and being thrifty," he said. "People here would rather have things repaired several times before abandoning them."

The drop in commodity prices was so rapid that in a matter of weeks last fall container ships carrying used railroad wheels and empty dog food cans arrived in Chinese ports worth far less than they had been when they departed Newark, Rotterdam or Los Angeles.

"Everything was moving along just fine until October and then we fell off a cliff," said Bruce Savage, a spokesman for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade organization that mostly represents American waste processing companies.

The United States exported $22 billion worth of recycled materials to 152 countries in 2007. Now the organization estimates the value of American recyclables has decreased by 50 to 70 percent. Western dealers say they are grappling with mounting stockpiles whose value in many cases continues to sink. To make matters worse, Chinese importers have been demanding to renegotiate contracts drastically downward. In some cases, they are refusing to accept shipments they already have a contractual obligation to take.

"There are still many containers full of waste sitting at the port in Hong Kong," Mr. Wang, of China National Resources Recycling Association, said. "It's hard to say when they'll be picked up."

According to the association, a ton of copper scrap now sells for $3,000, down from more than $8,000 in 2007.

Tin is now selling for $5 a pound, down from $300. Paper has sagged by as much as 80 percent.

"People in this industry were once making a killing taking waste from overseas, but the era of huge profits is now over," Mr. Wang said.

The tough times are hitting Chinese recyclers at every level. Gao Zuxue's family runs a small collection depot in central Beijing.

Standing in a dimly lighted, half-empty room that is usually packed with broken radiators, soda bottles and newspapers, Mr. Gao said he earned nearly $450 a month in the boom days of 2007. Now he is lucky to make $80.

"People aren't selling their junk to us because they think the price is ridiculous," he said.

Many manufacturers that process imported recyclables are finding it difficult to stay in business.

"My goal is just to survive," said Luo Guoliang, an executive at the Yang Xin Long Fu Company in Shandong province, which makes polyester and polypropylene filaments for fabric and rugs, all of it recycled material.

Mr. Luo said his company imported a third of its plastic from abroad last year, paying $1,200 for a ton of shredded plastic bottle flakes. While the company now pays half that amount, he said many of his domestic suppliers had closed, making it difficult to find the raw material for production.

Yet, in China's current malaise, the company has bigger concerns. Fearing instability, the local government has forbidden factories from laying off workers, even as sales evaporate.

"The damage from the economic crisis is unbearable." Mr. Luo said.

Across the Pacific, waste traders in the United States are shutting mills, cutting production and selling their stock at fire-sale prices. George Adams, president of SA Recycling, which processes metal at 40 recycling plants in the western United States, said he wrote down $10 million in losses in October.

"That inventory is gone now, but the pain I won't soon forget," said Mr. Adams, who ships much of his product to China.

Environmentalists and recycling experts worry about the impact of the recycling slump. With Western curbside recycling programs becoming less profitable, local governments are being forced to re-examine their programs as they struggle to balance budgets. In some cases, that means that office printouts and soda cans, once exported, went to landfills.

"It used to be that recyclers would pay governments for these goods," said Mr. Savage of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. "But now governments have to pay recyclers. What was once a revenue stream is now a cost to cities."

While recycling executives say prices have bottomed out and in some cases have improved slightly — for copper and plastics, for example — they are bracing for tough times ahead as the global economic crisis wears on.

So, too, are the residents of Bajiacun, a village built on trash on the outskirts of Beijing, where hundreds of people earn a living from — and live among — other people’s castoffs.

On a recent day, Chen Xiaorong, 36, squatted on a vast island of stockpiled notepads, magazines and schoolbooks near her tiny red-brick shack, a tower of newspapers looming above her.

"I know people who lost everything betting on recycling," she said. Many of her neighbors have returned to the countryside, while the $735 her extended family would earn a month has shrunk to $360.

Sorting through discarded calligraphed sheets of Chairman Mao's poems, she added, "China now has more garbage than it can digest. Do we really need America's junk, too?"



Backfire on recycling--now what?

Dirty Al's Surplus could be in "hog heaven"

"Electronic goods recycling" poll

Junk televisions and recycling

LAMOST ushers in "Year of Astronomy"

I have not heard of China's new telescope--the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope [LAMOST].

The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) is a meridian reflecting Schmidt telescope. Using active optics technique to control its reflecting corrector makes it a unique astronomical instrument in combining large aperture with wide field of view. The available large focal plane may accommodate up to thousands of fibers, by which the collected light of distant and faint celestial objects down to 20.5 magnitude is fed into the spectrographs, promising a very high spectrum acquiring rate of ten-thousands of spectra per night. The telescope will be located at the Xinglong Station of National Astronomical Observatories. The project’s budget is RMB 235 millions yuan. It will bring Chinese astronomy into the 21century with a leading role in wide field spectroscopy and in the fields of large scale and large sample astronomy and astrophysics.--Wikipedia

"China begins celebrating Int'l Year of Astronomy"

January 10th, 2009

Xinhua News Agency

BEIJING (Xinhua) -- China kicked off the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) at the Beijing Planetarium here on Saturday.

IYA2009 was initiated by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Astronomy Union (IAU) as a way to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the moment when Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) began observing the universe through a telescope.

"The universe is yours to discover during the International Year of Astronomy. It's not only a year for astronomers but also more importantly, it's for the whole public," said Zhu Jin, president of the planetarium. "We hope more and more people will join us."

Every country will hold it's own festivities in January and February in recognition of the discovery.

China's slogan is: Mystery Universe, Chinese Vision.

There will be a series of activities, such as speeches, observations, teacher trainings, article competitions and a National Olympiad in Astronomy for middle school students and pupils, Zhu said.

"China has the longest history of astronomic observation," said Ji Peiwen, an official with the National Science Foundation of China.

"The country made a lot of contribution to the astronomy world in recent years, by sending its detector to the moon and a taikonaut walked in the outer space."

China also started using a large-scale astronomical telescope named LAMOST. It cost 235 million yuan (about 35 million U.S. dollars). The country planned to establish a 500-meter-diameter telescope named FAST, Ji said.

"That means China will add more contributions to the world's astronomy field," he said.

Global events for IYA2009 include 100 Hours of Astronomy, an observational relay, and an exhibition entitled: From Earth to the Universe (FETTU) Cornerstone Project.

China will also take part in World at Night, an event where people around the world turn of their lights to see stars.

"Ever since Galileo held up his telescope toward the sky, when human being's view towards the universe changed, mankind had never stopped pursuing the mystery of the universe," said Wang Enge, deputy general secretary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The grand ceremony for IYA2009 will be held by UNESCO in Paris, France on Jan. 15 and 16.

LAMOST

Changing horizon of space exploration participants

I suppose this can be view as a good thing and a bad thing for the technological supremacy over the past 50 years or so achieved by the United States will probably succumb to global interests from other countries like Russia and China. Prestige is lost but now there is a community of participants and that is a good thing. The current world economy will hurt the quantity of participation of all the players but it is important to highlight the world "players". More players are better and no one country should hold all the bag of marbles in the game of space exploration.

"One Way Up: U.S. Space Plan Relies on Russia"

by

John Schwartz

October 5th, 2008

The New York Times

STAR CITY, Russia - This place was once no place, a secret military base northeast of Moscow that did not show up on maps. The Soviet Union trained its astronauts here to fight on the highest battlefield of the cold war: space.

Yet these days, Star City is the place for America's hard-won orbital partnership with Russia, where astronauts train to fly aboard Soyuz spacecraft. And in two years Star City will be the only place to send astronauts from any nation to the International Space Station.

The gap is coming: from 2010, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuts down the space shuttle program, to 2015, when the next generation of American spacecraft is scheduled to arrive, NASA expects to have no human flight capacity and will depend on Russia to get to the $100 billion station, buying seats on Soyuz craft as space tourists do.

As NASA celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, the time lag in the Bush administration's plan to retire the nation’s three space shuttles and work on a return to the Moon has thrust the United States space program squarely into national politics and geopolitical controversy.

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have denounced the gap and promoted their commitment to the space program while on trips to Florida, where thousands of workers will lose their jobs when the shuttle program ends. And antagonism between the United States and Russia, over the conflict in Georgia and other issues, is clouding the future of a 15-year partnership in space, precisely when NASA will be more reliant on Russia than ever before.

The administrator of NASA, Michael D. Griffin, has called the situation "unseemly in the extreme." In an e-mail message he sent to his top advisers in August, Dr. Griffin wrote that "events have unfolded in a way that makes it clear how unwise it was for the U.S. to adopt a policy of deliberate dependence on another power."

Dr. Griffin is worried enough that he ordered his staff to explore flying the aging shuttles past 2010. He did so, he said in an interview last month, "about five minutes after the Russians invaded Georgia, because I could see this coming." But he warned that any extension would be costly and could further delay NASA's return to the Moon and threaten America's role as the leading space power.

China's Gains

Last month, China made the third successful launching of its Shenzhou VII spacecraft and the first spacewalk by one of its astronauts. The Chinese government has said it hopes to establish a space station and eventually make a Moon landing. The United States plans to return to the Moon by 2020 at the earliest; some observers believe China might get there first.

The interruption in American-controlled access to space rankles some in Washington, including Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a leading proponent of the space program. In an interview, Mr. Nelson said it was "inexcusable" for the country's space program to be put in a position of dependence on such a politically volatile partner. "We've got a Russian prime minister who believes he's czar," he said of Vladimir Putin, referring to Russia's military action in Georgia.

The United States has had periods in which its astronauts could not reach space: from the end of the Apollo program in 1975 to the beginning of shuttle flights in 1981, and for more than two years after the loss of the shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. But the coming interval could be the longest if the rollout of NASA's new rockets is significantly delayed.

Even though the outlines of the gap have been known since soon after Dr. Griffin began running the agency in 2005, Cmdr. Scott J. Kelly of the Navy, an astronaut who has made two trips to orbit, warned in April that the prospect of a United States that could not send humans into space on its own rockets would come as a shock. "A large part of the American public is going to be surprised," he said, adding that people would cry, "Who let that happen?"

The Politics

The Bush administration chose to give up the nation's own access to space for five years and move to the next phase of space travel. The administration decided to retire the shuttles and in January 2004 announced a sweeping "vision for space exploration."

Under the plan, NASA would stop using the aging and risky shuttle fleet and move to a new launching program, Constellation, built around Ares rockets and Orion capsules that are designed to return astronauts to the Moon and even to explore near-Earth asteroids and Mars.

To get from one program to the other without inflating NASA's $17 billion annual budget, the administration decided to wind down the shuttle program and ramp up Constellation. The decision has always been portrayed as difficult, but in recent months, criticism has flared. The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, for example, have pledged to keep America flying.

"As president, I will act to ensure our astronauts will continue to explore space, and not just by hitching a ride with someone else," Mr. McCain said in a statement this year. Mr. Obama has criticized what he has called the "poor planning and inadequate funding" that have led to the situation.

Both candidates say NASA should explore the continuation of the shuttle program for at least one additional flight and try to speed up the development of Constellation with more financing.

Any new money, though, would come too late to greatly shorten the development time for the new craft. "It is essentially unfixable now," Dr. Griffin said. His growing frustration was clear in his e-mail message to aides on Aug. 18, which included the order to study the additional flights.

"In a rational world, we would have been allowed to pick a shuttle retirement date to be consistent with Ares/Orion availability," Dr. Griffin wrote. Within the administration, he wrote, "retiring the shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision."

After the message was published by The Orlando Sentinel, Dr. Griffin issued a statement saying his message had failed "to provide the contextual framework for my remarks, and my support for the administration’s policies."

At the time, legislation vital to NASA's gap plans - permission by Congress to buy Soyuz seats after 2011 - was stalled by the furor over the Russian action in Georgia. That problem was resolved last month when Congress quietly granted approval, but the broader issues presented by the gap remain. And Dr. Griffin's concerns do not end with Russia and Washington politics. He has repeatedly warned that China's space program is moving forward rapidly.

In testimony to the Senate last year, Dr. Griffin said it was likely that "China will be able to put people on the Moon before we will be able to get back." That prospect concerns Representative Tom Feeney, Republican of Florida. A fellow congressman recently suggested naming the first new lunar base after Neil Armstrong. Mr. Feeney recalled responding, "What makes you think the Chinese are going to give us permission to name their base after one of our astronauts?"

The Partnership

The growing tension with Russia complicates a longstanding international alliance in space that helped defuse the cold war, especially among those who had served at the front lines.

William M. Shepherd, the first commander of the station and a former member of the Navy Seals, recalled that when he and his crewmate Yuri Gidzenko first orbited the Earth, the two cold warriors pointed to bases where, years before, they had trained and waited on alert.

"I realized at that moment we were not an American and a Russian any more," Mr. Shepherd said. "It was about something that transcended that whole canvas."

The partnership began in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union and its economy collapsed and Russian knowledge about carrying people into orbit - or bombs to distant destinations - was at risk of falling into the hands of hostile nations. In paying to help keep the Russian space program going, the logic went, the United States would limit arms proliferation. By the mid-1990s Americans began serving aboard the Mir space station as the United States and Russia planned what would become the International Space Station.

The early days were marked by wariness. Mark Bowman, an early contract employee in Russia who is now back in Moscow as a NASA representative, said that Korolev, where mission control is, "was a closed city" when he arrived in 1993. "Foreigners were not allowed here," Mr. Bowman said.

These days, teams of NASA workers live year round in Russia and dozens of others come through for training runs, launchings and landings. "I'd venture to say the people who work at NASA know the Russians better than any other branch of our government," Commander Kelly, the astronaut, said.

Susan Eisenhower, an expert on United States-Russia relations and the space programs, said the Russians proved after the loss of the shuttle Columbia that they would hold up their end of the bargain by continuing to take Americans to the station. "When we had no choice because of the shuttle failure the Russian could have blackmailed us around this tragedy and did not do so," Ms. Eisenhower said.

Vitaly Davidov, the deputy director of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said in an interview at mission control that Russia would honor its commitments to fly crews to the station.

That does not mean the going will be easy. The United States and Russia are at loggerheads over many trade and political issues. But Michael Krepon, who helped found the Henry L. Stimson Center, a policy institute, said that while the Russian space monopoly created risk, "there is a longstanding etiquette: you do not mess with the safety of humans in space."

"I don't think this is going to get very ugly if the gap problem continues," Mr. Krepon said. "But it will become expensive."

Total Solar Eclipse of 2008 on August 1st...from China

Potental for a spectacular event that may be witnessed everywhere on Earth...if you have a computer and access to the Internet provided by NASA.

Total Solar Eclipse of 2008--NASA

Also...

SkyandTelescope.com

Space.com

SpaceWeather.com