chi-chu.tschang.net

The Electric Rice Cooker: How WeiboScope came to fruition

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:38:37 -0400

The Electric Rice Cooker: How WeiboScope came to fruition:

The JMSC’s WeiboScope is a visualisation project that came to life in late 2011, but which would not have been possible without the social media project led by my then-boss Dr. Fu King-wa. The public may have heard of the catchy name of WeiboScope, but it really builds on the data gathering…

Skepticism Greets Google’s Attempt to Deal With Censored Terms in China

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 01:29:07 -0400

Skepticism Greets Google’s Attempt to Deal With Censored Terms in China

What's in a weibo?

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 01:28:50 -0400

What's in a weibo?

Charting China’s Social Media Censorship

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:01:56 -0400

Charting China’s Social Media Censorship

Cool Data Visualizations Shed Light on Chinese Microblog Censorship

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:01:32 -0400

Cool Data Visualizations Shed Light on Chinese Microblog Censorship

Reverse engineering Chinese censorship: When and why are controversial tweets deleted?

Wed, 30 May 2012 15:22:35 -0400

Reverse engineering Chinese censorship: When and why are controversial tweets deleted?

The 6 most-censored events from 2012 on China's Twitter

Sun, 27 May 2012 16:09:32 -0400

The 6 most-censored events from 2012 on China's Twitter

MAS S61 final project 1st draft

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:44:00 -0400

For the final class project, I want to do something with the data collected from the University of Hong Kong Journalism and Media Studies Centre’s WeiboScope Search project. In class last week, Ethan Zuckerman suggested that one option may be to do an online art piece using the most censored Chinese words on Sina Weibo. Out of curiosity, I did a draft of the 100 most censored Chinese words on Sina Weibo to see what came up. Here’s a quick translation of the most censored Chinese words:

转发微博 retweet weibo (simplified Chinese)

转 retweet

转发 retweet

轉發微博 retweet weibo (traditional Chinese)

哈哈 ha ha

偷笑 smile

嘻嘻 hee hee

呵呵 he he

哈 ha

哈哈哈 ha ha ha

蜡烛 candle

怒 anger

吃惊 surprise

泪 tears

围观 crowd

话筒 microphone

思考 think

赞 praise

威武 mighty

求证 confirm

衰 decline

挖鼻屎 pick boogers

The most common words are the Chinese equivalent of “retweet” or “RT.” The next most common are expressions, such as “ha ha” or “anger.” It doesn’t make much sense that the 50 cent party are simply censoring emotions. I’ll need to figure out a way to come up with a way to dig one layer deeper.

@jainee_ankit and my recommendations on clusters in China made it to Tim Geithner .. #heartMIT

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:57:56 -0400

This semester, my classmate Ankit Jain and I are working with Professor Huang Yasheng on a consulting project he has with the provincial government of Guangdong. Ankit and I, along with one of Professor Huang Yasheng’s PhD students, made a trip to the Pearl River Delta region over spring break to interview factories for this project. We received an email from Professor Huang Yasheng at 9:21 PM Monday evening with the heading: “urgent need for some information on your trip” asking us six questions. In the email, Professor Huang Yashengsaid that he needed the information for a talk he would be giving at 10:30 AM the next morning in Washington D.C.

We just got out of a meeting with Professor Huang Yasheng to discuss the latest status on our project. It turns out that Professor Huang Yasheng met with U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner while he was in Washington D.C. The U.S. Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State will be traveling to Beijing next week for the Strategic Economic Dialogue so Timothy Geithner wanted to get outside input from Professor Huang Yasheng on the Chinese currency issue.

Birds of a feather flock together

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:52:00 -0400

Birds of a feather flock together:

At the wildly-successful MBA Charity Auctions last semester students bid on big-ticket items like professional sports tickets and shopping trips to New York.

But one lucky student bid on and won a group hug from the Caribbean Pelicans. It went for $50 and the winner scored an embrace with MBA ’12 students Bilikiss Adebiyi, Jamie Fordyce, Chi-Chu Tschang, K, Kuohsin Chen, and Anand Dass. Group hugs are what the Pelicans, a close-knit group, are known for.

The Pelicans are just one of several teams in the Caribbean Cohort, or “ocean.” At the start of the MIT Sloan MBA program, all students are divided into oceans and then divided further into multiple teams, to support their success in the first-semester MBA Core. The Core teams, assigned by the MIT Sloan administration, are designed to be as diverse as possible. The students spend nearly three-and-a-half intense months together, but then typically disband and go their separate ways after the Core ends.

The six Caribbean Pelicans from the class of 2012 formed such an unusually tight-knit group that they still meet up socially and for school work. Dass said the bond among his group formed quickly, when they met at the start of the program and discussed mutual goals.

“Early on, we spent a lot of time discussing our expectations both professionally and personally. We alternated responsibilities in assigning homework and we just set the structure up front,” he said.

Dass said because of these boundaries, the group members understood and respected that the bonds weren’t just based on friendship – otherwise no work would have been accomplished. “If we based it on just friendship, the quality of our work would have dropped.”

Once the teamwork responsibilities were established, the group took an informal retreat to Fordyce’s summer home in Rhode Island.

“We cooked lobster, played guitar, and made a fire,” Fordyce remembered. K instigated the group hug as a way of boosting morale when the Core got rough, and six lifetime friendships were forged.

In working on MBA projects, the Pelicans have supported one another’s ambitions and professional aspirations. When Dass entered the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition 4th Annual Elevator Pitch Contest last year [he was the winner], his fellow Pelicans encouraged him to practice during his Communication for Managers (15.280) class. Tschang inquired whether he should really pursue a career in finance, and the other Pelicans honestly urged him to consider other career options. After much consideration, he ultimately accepted a job offer at J.P. Morgan.

“We all really help each other out in terms of advice. It’s very nice to know you can count on your teammates,” said Chen.

Last semester, several of them took the Early Stage Capital elective class (15.391), and they formally re-formed the Pelicans Core team because the class was so intense. Adebiyi was grateful for the renewed study group.
“I had a lot of things going on at the time,” she said. “I just trust these guys, and they picked up the slack for me and didn’t make me feel bad about it. It was really very nice.”

As their MBA program winds down, the Pelicans don’t socialize together as much as they would like, but they still find time for lunches and occasional weekend getaways. Last May, K, Tschang, Chen, and Adebiyi all traveled to Puerto Rico on vacation. K and Fordyce met up in Panama over IAP recently, and some of the other Pelicans’ travels have overlapped during international tours and treks, as well.

They are now considering a group trip to Europe, possibly after Commencement, Dass said.

“We’ll definitely be in touch, although I don’t know how often we’ll get to see each other,” K said.

“I don’t want to think about it,” Dass lamented. By Amy MacMillan

15.S09 Should Shunde Be Worried?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:44:16 -0400

Last week, we visited Foshan to interview factories for a consulting project that Professor Huang Yasheng is doing for the Guangdong provincial government. One of our first stops in Foshan was to the ginormous Shunde District Government Office, which the locals have dubbed “Shunde White House.” The Communist Party of China has cited Shunde’s government office one of the more extravagant government office buildings. It also got me wondering: Where did the Shunde district government get the money to build the government office building? I checked Shunde district government’s fiscal budget for the past decade and came up with this graph:

It looks like Shunde district government’s revenues have been growing because they have been collecting more income tax from the companies in the region. Shunde’s government has benefited from having white goods manufacturer Midea based there. Midea accounts for 70% of the township’s GDP. Last year, Midea paid 5.2 billion RMB ($823.6 million) in taxes or almost 60% of Shunde’s income tax revenues, according to the Beijiao Economy Promotion Bureau.

Naturally, I then wondered where the Shunde District Government was spending all of its money (besides building huge government office buildings). Surprisingly, the number one expenditure by the Shunde District Government was in education. Last year, the Shunde district government spent 2.9 billion RMB or 22% of its total expenditures on education.

When I combined the two graphs of Shunde District Government’s revenues and expenditures, it turns out that Shunde has had a deficit in 8 out of the past 10 years. The only two years when Shunde didn’t report a deficit were in 2008 and 2009, which is a bit ironic since the financial crisis was pushed most other governments further into debt.

A lot of local governments took on debt in 2008 and 2009 to invest in transportation infrastructure projects to get through the financial crisis. The National Audit Office came out with a report in June 2011 estimating that China’s local government held a cumulative 10.7 trillion RMB ($1.7 trillion) in debt at the end of 2010. Some policymakers and academics in China have been starting to get a little concerned because 17.17% of the debt needs to be paid back last year and this year.

Photo

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 02:49:26 -0400

This is the government hostel [华桂园招待所] where I’m staying...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 05:38:00 -0400

This is the government hostel [华桂园招待所] where I’m staying at in Shunde, Guangdong province.

Shunde district government office building aka Shunde White...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:22:00 -0400

Shunde district government office building aka Shunde White House [顺德白宫]

pi day

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:53:00 -0400

pi day

MAS S61 assignment #3

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:20:00 -0500

MAS S61 assignment #1: media diet

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 23:26:00 -0500

This semester, I am taking Ethan Zuckerman’s class News and Participatory Media at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. For our first assignment, we had to keep a log of our media consumption for a week. This is my media diet for the week of February 8-14, 2012.

It’s unusually warm in Boston.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:09:03 -0500

It’s unusually warm in Boston.

Who Says Colombians are All Drug Traffickers?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:11:40 -0500

What I’ll remember the most about the experience working in Bogota is the kindness and generosity of everyone I met in Colombia. For this G-Lab class, one of our final deliverables is to come up with a poster to showcase the work we did for our G-Lab client Oruga Touching Dreams. In the process of trying to figure out what to put on our poster last week, we decided to check with Oruga Touching Dreams to see if they could send us some of their character animations to put on our poster. Oruga Touching Dreams CEO & executive producer Pedro Tosin readily agreed and assigned one of his animators Harry Villamil to go through Oruga Touching Dreams’ database and pull up some character animations for us. But after waiting a day, Harry Villamil still hadn’t sent us the characters animations. It turns out that Pedro Tosin had pushed back one of Oruga Touching Dreams’ deadline for a client by a day and asked three animators to do the poster for us! Oruga Touching Dreams even created the caterpillar and butterfly just for our poster. Mucho gracias Oruga Touching Dreams por lo que el G-Lab como una experiencia increible en Colombia.

I’m not too sure what this is, but they’re selling...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:39:27 -0500

I’m not too sure what this is, but they’re selling it at an orange juice stand on the side of the road.