特别的生日礼物 / A Special Birthday Gift

我刚收到李露送给我的特别的生日礼物。她是我在高威的房东Angela的女儿。谢谢你，李露，我很喜欢这张卡片，我今年最难忘的生日礼物了。

啊，是啊，今天是我的生日！谢谢你们的祝福，谢谢你们我的朋友、同学，哈，还有我的妹妹和父母！开心？太普通的用词了。 I just received a special gift from Li Lu, the daughter of my landlady Angela in Galway. Thank you Li Lu, I like the card very much, just lovely. It is absolutely the most unforgettable birthday gift I have ever had this year.

Oh, right, it is my birthday today! Thank you all for your greetings and bless. Thank you, my friends, classmates, and surprisingly, my sister and my parents! I can't feel happier now.

读书笔记 / Reading Notes: Cyberactivism

抱歉，暂无中文版本

Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers (eds) (2003) Cyberactivism: online activism in theory and practice.
Chapter 3: Vegh, Sandor (2003) Classifying forms of Online Activism: The Case of Cyberprotests against the World Bank
Vegh classify online mobilisation channels into three types:

• Alternative channels for offline actions, mainly communication;
• More efficient channels compared to traditional offline ones;
• Unique channels for activities only possible online.

Although the first two are very important, the third really catches the media and our eyes, especially when hackers and hacking are involved. As Vegh noticed, people tend to dramatised it.
Vegh further classifies online conflicts into three categories below "by examining the identity of the perpertrators and the target, the method and frequency of occurrence, the goal to be attained, and the damage caused":

• Cyberattack (isolated);
• Cybercampaign (coordinated, part of an identified conflict);
• Cyberwar (sustained mutual engagement).

As Vegh explained, although usually in the spotlights, cyberattacks conducted by individuals or civil groups rarely cause damage or direct loss to the international organisations such as the world bank. What they directly fight against is computer security experts and IT companies. This is like a gun-armed civil group against their mighty well-equipped national army. However, hacktivism does have strong meida effects which bring media exposures the organisations like. It also could, sometimes, change the aganda of big international organisations by mobilising people. But most of the time, it is questionable how effective "virtual match" or "virtual sitting in" could be.
However, it is no surprising that the protesters went online and invented all kinds of creative ways to continue cyberprotest. There are some personality links. Those people are usually open-minded anti-traditional and anti-authority - perfect fit for technology pioneers. Also the budget constraints make the "time- and cost- efficient" Internet the perfect tool for those protestors and convert them into "cyberprotestors".

给中文初学者的建议 / Tips for Mandarin Chinese Learners

抱歉，暂无中文版本

The learning curve for Chinese is much different from Latin languages - it is very, very steep. So here come a good news and bad news for you.

The bad news is you really have to show your commitment and study hard from the very beginning, and start from the Characters (NOT Pinyin!, I know it's hard, that's why it is a bad news).

The good news is after one month or even only two weeks, you will suddenly find everything becomes much, much easier - even easier than studying English, which requires continually vocabulary building while Chinese doesn't.

So here are some suggestion:

1. Ask yourself whether you really want to learn Chinese
2. If the answer of the first question is yes, pick up a period of about two weeks (a whole month would be even better); plan 3-5 hours Chinese study during this period;
3. Start from basic characters and their meaning then pronunciation (I know it is not the traditional way to learn Chinese as a second language which seldom works. You have to learn Chinese as your first language, otherwise you will forget everything after learning something)
4. Do not use Pinyin unless your teachers tell you to. (Pinyin is the major killer; it is a great tool, but too dangerous for beginners, including Chinese children)
5. You might feel totally confused in the first week, but be confident - everything would pay off after the first week. The first one hundred characters are the most difficult ones to learn. But after this milestone, you will find yourself start to UNDERSTAND Chinese, not only "LEARN" any more.

Remember the differences of the learning curves. I speak excellent Mandarin and very, very fluent English and Cantonese, and has been trying to compare and understand languages. What I found important to learn a foreign language is to forget that it is a foreign language. Don't think "how native people speak it". Instead, think "In which way I feel comfortable when I speak", because if you don't feel comfortable, the "native" probably feel the same way.

读书笔记 / Reading Notes: Conflict, Territory and New Technologies

抱歉，暂无中文版本

O Dochartaigh, Niall (2007) ‘Conflict, territory and new technologies: Online interaction at a Belfast interface’. Political Geography.

This reading is written by my lecturer of SP479, Politics and the Internet. I am not quite familiar with the Northern Ireland issue, nor could I understand why people hate each other based on their minor differences of almost the same religions. But I am no stranger to this kind of stupid yet fearful hatred - mainland China and Taiwan is another good example.

Dr. O Dochartaigh picked up some of the records of online message boards on the both sides on the "interface" in Belfast. The message shows that the people copied their offline violent behaviour online, threatening people on the other side and spreading fears and hatred.

It is very interesting that Internet does not play its role as a "global equaliser" to remove the boundaries but instead, it enhances the local communities and groups, and reinforce the boundaries -- boundaries not physical but in peoples minds and segregates people who should have lived together. Consistent with the theory of distance decay, almost no one outside care about the things happening in this area, either online or offline, which are important parts of the life of local people. Therefore, another kind of boundaries divide people inside and outside.

It is no surprising that the concept of online territory becomes visible when online boundaries are built. Not only do people in conflicts have their online territoris where they fight against any "invador", but even people in peaceful countries or integated societies divide themselves and built their online territories and boundaries which does not exist at all offline. Take Hong Kong for example, the conflict between male and female has been online for decades, and each side has their own e-forum or blogs with specific ideologies, supporting or fighting against faminism. There is no offline equivalent at all, because it is not imaginable that husbands and wives, or brothers and sisters, will fight against each other at home just for some ideology reasons. Internet changed the game.

Another interesting yet important question is whether internet promotes violence and extremism. The nature of Internet gives people the convenience to conduct online violent and the faster feedback to check the outcome, yet the illusion that they don't have the consequence because they don't face it directly. For example, online murderers will feel good about themselves and see the death of others as their acheivements - the only thing they have to face is just the word "suiside" or "death", while in the real world, they would actually see someone die in front of them. While violence can be conducted easily and the consequences get symbolised and public, people can be more easily illuted about the psycological rewards and punishments of misbehaviours.