-- Drivel --

Honda to make 2015 return with McLaren

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:20:20 +1000

Honda to make 2015 return with McLaren:

McLaren have confirmed a multi-year technology partnership with Honda, reviving one of the most famous technical associations in Formula One history.

From the start of 2015, McLaren’s cars will be powered by Honda engines and energy recovery systems, renewing a relationship between the two companies that won four drivers’ championships, four constructors’ championships and 44 Grands Prix between 1988 and 1992. ..read more

Debunking Panorama Paranoia: North Korea Tour Leader Simon Cockerell

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:21:14 +1000

Debunking Panorama Paranoia: North Korea Tour Leader Simon Cockerell:

Aside from verifying what is already widely known about North Korea – it’s poor, it’s tightly controlled, military presence is always close at hand – reports tend to offer only skewed accounts. Hence the rife misconceptions about what North Korea is like – especially amid recent tensions – and the media’s grossly simplified portrayals of the local tour guides who bridge the nation with the outside world, albeit in a limited way.

The Diplomat recently spoke with Simon Cockerell of North Korea tour operator Koryo Tours in Beijing. In this interview, Cockerell shares his observations on what it’s been like to be inside North Korea in recent days, the intricacies of tourism to the nation and the humanity of its misunderstood tour guides. He describes a very different experience to the one Panorama presented.

Do media reports typically portray North Korean tour guides in a fair light?

Very rarely are North Korean tour guides presented as anything other than a kind of Gestapo-like presence in the media. The tour guides we work with are not government agents. They are human beings with varied back stories, families and opinions of their own.

Some of them are very nice people, some are funny, some are very serious, some are more doctrinaire than others. Just like anywhere else. A disservice is done to them in most media reports by not attempting to find out more about them as people and using them as the translation resource that they can be to learn more about the country rather than seeing them as the embodiment of the North Korean state.

This is a monolithic and inaccurate view of who they are and what their role really is. However the media doesn’t thrive on nuance so the way they were represented in the recent BBC program was hardly unique or unexpected. They are just like people everywhere to be honest, not the automatons presented often in the news. ..read more

China 'reveals army structure' in defence white paper

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:19:26 +1000

China 'reveals army structure' in defence white paper:

China has revealed the structure of its military units, in what state-run media describe as a first.

The army has a total of 850,000 officers, while the navy and air force have a strength of 235,000 and 398,000, China said in its defence white paper.

The paper also criticised the US’s expanded military presence in the Asia Pacific, saying it had exacerbated regional tensions.

China’s defence budget rose by 11.2% in 2012, exceeding $100bn (£65bn).

The defence white paper, which state media describe as China’s 8th since 1998, emphasised China’s “unshakable national commitment… to take the road of peaceful development”.

However, it highlighted “multiple and complicated security threats” facing China, and China’s need to protect its “national unification, territorial integrity and development interests”.

Passport To Progress

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:31:45 +1000

Passport To Progress

Photo

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:51:59 +1100

Taken from the EP “Night Funk EP” by Gabbamonkey...

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 14:37:00 +1100

Taken from the EP “Night Funk EP” by Gabbamonkey
Label : Lo-Deep Recordings
cat # : LODG-004X
Released by Lo-Deep Recordings.
(p) + (c) 2013 Lo Deep.
All Rights Reserved

Winner!

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:25:56 +1100

Winner!

2013 Williams FW35

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:30:12 +1100

2013 Williams FW35

Pants vs. skirts: Flight attendants fight for choice

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:18:00 +1100

Pants vs. skirts: Flight attendants fight for choice:

Pants or skirts: it’s a routine daily morning choice for some working women. As simple as choosing between an americano or a cafe latte. But for Asiana Airlines flight attendants, there isn’t much of a choice.

The Asiana dress code details, among other things, the size and substance of earrings, length of skirts, color of hair and type of eye makeup the female attendants can wear. Their dress code is more than 10 pages long, while their male counterparts have only two pages to abide by.

After rounds of negotiations within the company and no progress, the women eventually brought the issue to the country’s human rights commission.

A year since street rallies and press conferences that saw Asiana stewardesses openly weeping for their rights, Kweon Soo-joung, a crew member who leads a labor union at the nation’s second-largest carrier, finally got an answer from the National Human Rights Commission of Korea last Monday.

The human rights body said Asiana’s skirt-only rule “implies sexual discrimination as it requires women to be shown in certain ways and the dress code also makes it hard for female flight attendants to protect passengers in the event of an emergency.”

The statement continued, “The dress code is excessive compared to that of other airlines. Most others offer both skirts and pants for female crew members.”

Asiana Airlines doesn’t have an immediate plan to provide pants for female crew members, but it altered the language of its dress code even before the human rights body announced its stance on the issue.

“We respect the recommendation of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea,” said Seo Ki-won, an official working at the public relations team of Asiana Airlines.

“We will consider producing pants the next time we produce a new line of uniforms. But some of the requirements have already loosened up.

“For example, lengths and specific colors of nails were written in the code, but now it only says nails should be neat and tidy,” added Seo. ..read more

Interesting English lesson

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:38:15 +1100

Interesting English lesson

Japan and China: Tensions Mounting

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:00:36 +1100

Japan and China: Tensions Mounting:

The back-and-forth between the rival sea powers will feel at once familiar and unfamiliar to any mariner of a certain, ahem, vintage. The U.S. Navy and Soviet Navy played more than their share of hair-raising games during the Cold War — particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, once Fleet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s progeny had matured into a peer competitor of the American fleet.

It was far from unusual for U.S. and Soviet warplanes, surface combatants, and especially submarines to target or maneuver around one another at close quarters. There were a variety of reasons for doing so that had little to do with indulging one’s inner Maverick and Goose. For instance, goading an opponent into taking defensive measures revealed something about the tactics he would deploy in wartime. Such encounters also furnished an invaluable opportunity to collect information about the rival navy’s sensors, electronic countermeasures, and weaponry. Electromagnetic emissions can be recorded and analyzed, with a view toward exposing and exploiting weaknesses. Tactical advantages can accrue.

And yet the run-ins between JSDF and PLA units feel different from their Cold War predecessors. There was a certain amount of flexibility in U.S.-Soviet brinksmanship, if only because the two sides were playing with each other for tactical reasons rather than competing over fixed geographic objects on the map. There was less to fire passions. Ideological one-upsmanship was commonplace. Being a provocateur was fun. But sovereignty — an arena for Thucydidean motives like fear and honor — wasn’t at stake when American and Soviet units met in the nautical commons. Even so, enough near misses took place that Washington and Moscow ultimately felt obliged to negotiate an accord governing incidents at sea.

One hopes warriors on both sides — and their political masters — will exercise discipline in the East China Sea. A deliberate conflict would be bad enough. An inadvertent one that heightened uncertainty, narrowed options, and compressed the decision cycles in Tokyo and Beijing would prove even more parlous. ..read more

Flipper’s Guitar - Groove Tube

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:16:24 +1100

Flipper’s Guitar - Groove Tube

Rick Ross, showing awareness with a brilliant T-shirt.

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 13:44:17 +1100

Rick Ross, showing awareness with a brilliant T-shirt.

2013 McLaren MP4-28

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 23:24:59 +1100

2013 McLaren MP4-28

Photo

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 01:08:50 +1100

Would China Block Korean Unification?

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 23:00:54 +1100

Would China Block Korean Unification?:

A recent research report on the growing economic integration between China and North Korea by the minority staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has attracted a bit of media attention. Like most other government documents,this report—titled, “China’s Impact on Korean Peninsula Unification and Questions for the Senate”— languished in obscurity until The Washington Post wrote a story about it last week. The argument of the brief report is simple: China’s extensive growing economic interests in North Korea are effectively turning the Hermit Kingdom into a 21^st-century “tributary province.” Consequently, Beijing will have both the incentive and capacity to block the future reunification of the two Koreas.

While such an argument may grab headlines in a leading American newspaper, it falls apart under analytical scrutiny. The report not only misunderstands the fundamental Chinese rationale for maintaining a divided Korean peninsula, but also misses the three more likely scenarios that will make it almost impossible for China to stand in the way of Korean reunification. ..read more.

Carl Craig, Moritz von Oswald, Francesco Tristano live at RFH

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 02:32:35 +1100

Carl Craig, Moritz von Oswald, Francesco Tristano live at RFH

Photo

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 23:21:27 +1100

The Power of Negative Thinking

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 23:25:00 +1100

The Power of Negative Thinking:

So to cope with the holidays, magazines and others are advising us to “think positive”—the same advice, in other words, that Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” was dispensing six decades ago. (During holidays, Peale once suggested, you should make “a deliberate effort to speak hopefully about everything.”) The result all too often mirrors the famously annoying parlor game about trying not to think of a white bear: The harder you try, the more you think about one.

Variations of Peale’s positive philosophy run deep in American culture, not just in how we handle holidays and other social situations but in business, politics and beyond. Yet studies suggest that peppy affirmations designed to lift the user’s mood through repetition and visualizing future success often achieve the opposite of their intended effect.

Fortunately, both ancient philosophy and contemporary psychology point to an alternative: a counterintuitive approach that might be termed “the negative path to happiness.” This approach helps to explain some puzzles, such as the fact that citizens of more economically insecure countries often report greater happiness than citizens of wealthier ones. Or that many successful businesspeople reject the idea of setting firm goals.

One pioneer of the “negative path” was the New York psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who died in 2007. He rediscovered a key insight of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome: that sometimes the best way to address an uncertain future is to focus not on the best-case scenario but on the worst.

Seneca the Stoic was a radical on this matter. If you feared losing your wealth, he once advised, “set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’ “

To overcome a fear of embarrassment, Ellis told me, he advised his clients to travel on the New York subway, speaking the names of stations out loud as they passed. I’m an easily embarrassed person, so in the interest of journalistic research, I took his advice, on the Central Line of the London Underground. It was agonizing. But my overblown fears were cut down to size: I wasn’t verbally harangued or physically attacked. A few people looked at me strangely.

Just thinking in sober detail about worst-case scenarios—a technique the Stoics called “the premeditation of evils”—can help to sap the future of its anxiety-producing power. The psychologist Julie Norem estimates that about one-third of Americans instinctively use this strategy, which she terms “defensive pessimism.” Positive thinking, by contrast, is the effort to convince yourself that things will turn out fine, which can reinforce the belief that it would be absolutely terrible if they didn’t.

In American corporations, perhaps the most widely accepted doctrine of the “cult of positivity” is the importance of setting big, audacious goals for an organization, while employees are encouraged (or compelled) to set goals that are “SMART”—”Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.” (It is thought that the term was first used in a 1981 article by George T. Doran.)

But the pro-goal consensus is starting to crumble. For one thing, rigid goals may encourage employees to cut ethical corners. In a study conducted by the management scholar Lisa Ordóñez and her colleagues, participants had to make words from a set of random letters, as in Scrabble. The experiment let them report their progress anonymously—and those given a specific target to reach lied far more frequently than those instructed merely to “do your best.” ..read more

Power of the Korean Film Producer: Park Chung Hee’s Forgotten Film Cartel of the 1960s Golden Decade and its Legacy

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:09:00 +1100

Power of the Korean Film Producer: Park Chung Hee’s Forgotten Film Cartel of the 1960s Golden Decade and its Legacy:

After censorship was eliminated in 1996, a new breed of writer-directors created a canon of internationally provocative and visually stunning genre-bending hit films, and new and established producers infused unprecedented venture capital into the local industry. Today, a bevy of key producers, including vertically integrated Korean conglomerates, maintain dominance over the film industry while engaging in a variety of relatively near-transparent domestic and international expansion strategies. Backing hits at home as well as collaborating with filmmakers in China and Hollywood have become priorities. In stark contrast to the way in which the film business is conducted today is Korean cinema’s Golden Age of the 1960s – an important but little-known period of rapid industrialization, high productivity and clandestine practices.

To develop a fuller understanding of the development of Korean cinema, this article investigates the complex interplay between film policy and production during the 1960s under authoritarian President Park Chung Hee, whose government’s unfolding censorship regime forced film producers to develop a range of survival strategies. A small but powerful cartel of producers formed alliances with a larger cohort of quasi-illegal independent producers, thus – against all the odds – enabling Korean cinema to achieve a golden age of productivity. An analysis of the tactics adopted by the industry reveals the ways in which producers negotiated policy demands and contributed to an industry “boom” – the likes of which were not seen again until the late 1990s. ..read more