China’s on-again-off-again relationship with Youtube continued its volatility last week. On Tuesday 24th of March, Youtube reported that it had been blocked in China and the video-sharing service was not restored until Friday 27th, only to become unavailable again today. World media has speculated that the Youtube shutdown was due to a posted video that purports to show Chinese police brutally beating Tibetans during the March 14th riots in Lhasa last year. The China Daily has quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Qing Gang as claiming that the footage is doctored and is “misrepresentative”. Below, P has embedded the controversial video, but viewers may need to login to Youtube to view it.

It was originally uploaded by a group positioning itself as the Tibetan government in exile and their website can be reached here. The Chinese police can be seen savagely beating what seem to be already subdued protestors. There are other videos which can be seen in Quicktime format here  which purport to show the torture of a Tibetan man who was trying to stop a monk from being attacked (P doesn’t have Quicktime, so can’t view the videos).

The Chinese channel CCTV has responded with this news broadcast, which emphasizes the death and destruction caused by the rioters.

The Chinese government has had a long tradition of censoring out net content that it doesn’t like. The latest clever strike against such censorship has been the Song of the Grass Mud Horse (Cao Ni Ma), which is, you guessed it, circulating on Youtube (no wonder they keep blocking access). In a Disney-esque montage, a childrens’ choir sings about the happy Grass Mud Horses that live in the MaLe Desert and the menacing river crabs that come to devour their grass. Each phrase is a pun and most of the song is distinctly X-rated. Cao ni ma, ‘though written in characters as grass mud horse, sounds like the chinese phrase for F*** your mother and the Male Desert is a similar obscenity. The river crabs (he xie) sound like the chinese word for harmony which has often been used by the government as a synonym for censorship.

Below find the 2 (X-rated) videos (both have subtitles). Clever using puns to prevent censorship!

Spotted this on a news segment about their growing popularity as pets. Serama chickens are miniature chickens – the mature cocks are about the size of a 500ml mineral water bottle! They originate from Malaysia and are beginning to gain popularity in the US and UK as pets. Regular pageants are held in parts of Malaysia and a prize-winning Serama can fetch about US$3000!

The chickens are really tiny and weigh less than 500g. Here are a few more pics courtesy of the feathersite.com. Notice the characteristic puffed-up chest and soldier-straight posture. Lots more pics at the feathersite!

Below is a rather blurry video of a Serama judging in action.

From its beginnings as Singapore’s only university, NUS has never appeared to make a lot of effort to reach out to its alumni – probably largely due to generous government funding. Unlike often cash-starved US and UK universities, NUS has always seemed flush with funds – throwing up new buildings and facilities with gay abandon. P feels that she is in a position to judge due to her collection of various degrees from different institutes at various levels. She always felt closer to her London alma maters (was it the smaller class sizes?) than to NUS, where she often felt lost in a faceless crowd (some lectures had nearly 400 students).

Don’t get her wrong – P made some good friends at NUS and remains very close to one of her lecturers there (who is now back in the States) who was her first mentor and helped shape her graduate career. However, the school as a whole remained an abstraction rather than something close to her heart.

This is all set to change in this era of increasing corporatisation (or at least NUS’s version of the same).

The recently-completed Shaw Foundation Alumni House is intended to serve as a home for returning alumni. Given the tiny size of Singapore island, NUS alumni that have not migrated can probably give few excuses for not dropping by.

P particularly liked the Waterway, a gallery with leaping metal salmon over a trickling watercourse, meant to symbolise alumni returning to the home stream. (P often wonders how come people who use this analogy never quite seem to realise that the returning salmon die shortly after spawning – ah well). Seriously speaking, the building was very impressive, all marble-esque floors and twining spiral staircases and is home to an auditorium, a plethora of conference and seminar rooms and a massive courtyard filled with some strange sculptures.

It was in the 300-seater auditorium that P found herself listening to a very enjoyable Jazz and Oldies concert, helmed by cultural medallion winner Iskander Ismail. The repertoire ran the gamut from Cole Porter to Rihanna (the ubiquitous Umbrella song), and there were some real standout performers. Law alumnus Rani Singam and Arts alumnus Karen Tan had already made the leap to professional performing (singing and acting respectively) so were rather expected to perform well. The madcap Karen ‘though, pulled off a great standup comedy routine before launching into a great rendition of Billy Joel’s You’re My Home (if only her fashion sense had been as good!). Notable among the undergraduate performers was Engineering student Shilli Yap who sang an Aretha Franklin medley with soul, a fantastic voice that never seemed to end and a great sense of rhythm. Tay Kexin as well did a nice job with the ubiquitous Umbrella – big voice for such a small girl.

The NUS Jazz band mostly supported the music pretty well, but they were dreadfully pedestrian about it and most important, really did not appear to be enjoying themselves. Their leader, Iskander, in contrast was going great guns throughout on the keyboard.

On the whole a very pleasant evening, almost unexpectedly so, for a free concert.

Leaving you with original footage of Aretha Franklin singing Chain of Fools.

Pretensions recently attended a Science in the Cafe event featuring a talk by Prof. Oussama Khatib from the School of Computer Science at Stanford University.

The affable Khatib took the opportunity to show off his haptic device which allowed users to move a virtual ball around the screen and “feel” the texture of a membrane by pushing the ball against and ultimately through it.

P also played with computerised textures, where you could run a cursor over simulated corrugated iron and “feel” the corrugations.

Prof. Khatib informed us that the seemingly frivolous tool had real applications in many fields, such as for remote surgery, where it would allow the surgeon to feel a virtual organ when cutting into it. Robots could also ease difficult surgery for example robotic catheter technology has been used to facilitate the insertion of a long catheter from the leg vein into the heart.

A Stanford spinoff company called Hansen Medical has a new robot called Sensei, which can treat atrial fibrillation, a common heart disorder, in a non-invasive fashion. The robot allows the stable positioning of wires and tubes into the heart, so as to deliver a precisely tuned pulse of energy to destroy the misfiring heart muscles.

The scientist then treated the audience to a video presentation that took P through several centuries of robotics, from the time of Leonardo da Vinci (who developed designs for a robot knight) onwards.  P was particularly impressed with the 18th century automatons that could play the organ semi-convincingly and even write (see video below, in french sorry)!

Obviously things have come a long way since then, but many of the basic challenges remain, such as:

• Sensing – how can the robot detect reality?
• Planning/Control – how does it plan its response?
• Human-Robot Interactions – the robot needs to be able to interact with humans safely but this tends to compromise performance
• Mechanisms/Actuation – how to actually make the robot move/respond

There have also been some interesting developments lately that might not be robots per se but draw directly on the technology, like this Japanese robotic exoskeleton (allows the wearer to lift heavy loads).

Pretensions finally got round to watching this year’s Academy Award winner Kate Winslet in “The Reader" a historical romance cum drama. She really enjoyed it and could see why Kate walked away with the statuette this year.

Directed by Stephen Daldry, The Reader is set in post-World War II Germany where we are first introduced to the protagonist, Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), who we discover has an upcoming meeting with his daughter. A passing train leads to a flashback where Michael thinks back to his teenage years in 1958. At that time, he remembers coming down with scarlet fever and how a kind and attractive woman (Kate Winslet) comforts him and helps him home. Upon recovering, 15 year-old Michael (played quite convincingly by David Kross) becomes obsessed with the woman and tracks down her home, where he embarks on a tempestuous Mrs Robinson-nesque affair with a much older woman, Hanna Schmitz. Hanna enjoys being read to by Michael and often asks for excerpts from novels, such as Chekov’s The Lady with the Dog,  to be read to her before sex. Michael remains in love with Hanna throughout the summer, ignoring all girls his own age, but one day, after a quarrel, he comes to Hanna’s flat to find her gone.

The scene then shifts to a courtroom in 1966, where Michael, now in his ‘20s, is attending Heidelberg Law School. As part of a special class under Professor Rohl (Bruno Ganz), he attends a trial of 6 ex-SS officers who stand accused of the murder of 300 Jews by locking them in a burning church. He is stunned to see that Hanna is one of the defendants. The trial hinges on a handwritten report that was made by the women; Hanna claims that all 6 of them contributed to it, but the others accuse her of being the leader. In order to save herself from life imprisonment, Hanna must reveal a secret she has kept all her life; a secret that only Michael can guess. The rest of the movie revolves around the agony of decision and what came from those decisions.

Without giving away too much, Pretensions found the plot tender and painful. Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes both give excellent portrayals of people who must live with shameful secrets, especially the one of their illicit love. So much is said, but even more lies in the weighted glances exchanged by the two, the aversion of the eyes, a reaching out that finds no reciprocation.

Kate Winslet plays Hanna as she ages from confident 36-year old to a grey, beaten 66. She is always believable and one admires her easy belief that the truth is self-evident and must be told, while she continues to hide her many secrets. P could not always like Hanna, because of her matter-of-fact admittance of murder, but could admire her as a strong woman who would not hide behind others.

This is definitely a weepy on the scale of The English Patient, but thoroughly recommended to those who enjoy masterly character sketches with a historical gloss.