update on little things that happened

... and also because I wanted to scoot down the clip art photo of the dime, which, although topical, should not be left to linger (it's too impersonal-feeling to me). So.

There was a little forest fire yesterday near our campus. We're tucked right up against the Pat Sin range, which were lush and vibrantly green in august and now, despite the humidity, have browned quite a bit, and even blurred by the haze, no longer look nearly so pleasant. I was outside, handing out flyers to passing students/staff/random visitors about activities we're putting on this week, when all of a sudden, I saw a very low-flying helicopter swoop in over campus, a large red bucket slung beneath it. My friend pointed out the thin smudge of smoke rising against the mountains nearby, and told me that the helicopter had been flying back and forth, hauling water over to dump (from low altitude, and so out of our line of vision) on the nascent fire. We watched it fly back and forth from the fire just north of us to what was almost certainly the reservoir to our southeast. Each load of water required more than one pass, since presumably the pilot wanted to dump most of it on a relatively small area, so we got to watch him take his craft through sharp turns in the valley below us, the bucket describing wide arcs to his nearly-in-place pivots. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera. But it was pretty cool, seeing a helicopter doing something important up-close like that.

And then parts of yesterday evening and today, when the wind died down, the air smelled burned and gross and I was less happy about the whole situation.

I mailed a letter today. Our "post office" is a truck that comes to campus from 10:30-11:30, mondaywednesdayfriday, so I'd been meaning to send this one for a while but kept either working or sleeping through the critical hour. First of all, I was surprised to find that an airmail stamp to the US for a letter (no postcard, this) was comparable to, maybe even cheaper than, a first-class stamp in the US. Secondly, I don't have envelopes here, so instead of trying to find, you know, an envelope store or something, I found instructions on the internet and folded my own. I was in a bit of a hurry, so it's not perfect, but I think it looks pretty nice, and it seemed to seal ok. Which is important, because neither I nor the postal truck had tape, so it's just folded shut, not really sealed. Chris, if you get an empty envelope, I apologize and I'll send something for serious (taped shut) soon.

the power of the internet, or, I didn't get much real work done today

So I was reading an otherwise fairly unremarkable NY Times editorial today about policy decisions and happiness. And then, about halfway down the piece:

"Happiness seems fairly cheap to manipulate. In one experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire about personal satisfaction after Xeroxing a sheet of paper. Those who found a dime lying on the Xerox machine reported substantially higher satisfaction with their lives."

Nothing says "unverifiable apocryphal story" quite like the words "In one experiment", so I figured I probably should dig around on the internet to find the truth.

As it turns out, it was an actual study. And, indeed, it was mentioned at the bottom of the second internet-page of this other NY Times article from 1999, which notes:

"Dr. [Norbert] Schwarz... has conducted an experiment in which some people who used a University of Michigan copying machine found a dime that researchers planted, while others were not given a dime to find.

After using the copier, people were asked how happy they were about life, and those who found a dime were consistently more upbeat about ''their lives as a whole, the economy, that kind of thing,'' Dr. Schwarz said. ''We've found that a dime can make you happy for about 20 minutes. Then your mood wears off.''

So, a real study done by a real Doctor of something, proving that finding a dime does indeed make you happier, although certainly this reference to the study retains some ambiguity. Another article referring to the dime study makes a further claim:

"Schwarz of the University of Michigan found that people who came upon unclaimed dimes at a copy machine (planted by researchers) reported greater levels of overall satisfaction with their lives than those who did not find coins. (Their upbeat mood, however, lasted for only 20 minutes.)

The study had another twist. When researchers asked participants about their happiness levels - but first asked them if they'd discovered dimes at a copy machine and heard them say yes - the coins lost their ability to influence mood. It seems chance events failed to influence mood once the participants were made conscious of the event.

For Schwarz, the dime study shows just how people's happiness levels fluctuate throughout the day based on random events. We can gain more control over our moods, he explained, if we acknowledge that there are random forces that influence them."

So the study has a kind of clear academic angle, or, at least, clear to someone who studies this kind of thing. More searching for Schwarz only turns up papers with titles like "Situated Cognition and the Wisdom of Feelings: Cognitive Tuning", which I definitely don't understand any of. But it's more than enough to allay my doubts about the authenticity of the Dime Study. Success!

what I do for fun

((Photo from wikipedia: Hong Kong Jockey Club))

It's a sign someone is cool when they combine their academic interests with their recreational activities, right? Well, I just spent the last hour parsing this article, and, let me tell you, by the above definition, I'm pretty darn cool. For those of you not particularly interested in reading the whole thing, a summary:

It's an econ paper that addresses rates of return for betting on horseracing in the US, UK, and Australia. Basically, it's been empirically established since the late 1940s that the higher the odds on a horse (the less favored it is to win), the lower the expected payoff for bets placed on that horse (expected = based on how those races actually turned out). So you lose something like 5.5% betting only on favorites and something like 65% betting on 100:1 or worse horses. The question the authors of the paper are addressing is how to explain this discrepancy: do gamblers value risk more than they do actually breaking even, or is it that people don't have a good understanding of what it means to have 100:1 odds against something happening?

Cool part #1: the paper shows that these two explanations are functionally equivalent if you only look at the payoff data for simple bets-to-win. So there has not been a historical consensus because the two models explain the empirical evidence equally well.

Instead, the authors use 'exotic bets'--quinella, exacta, and trifecta bets and their actual rates of return--to serve as a tiebreaker between the two models. This is where my recreational time comes in: at the Hong Kong track, I prefer quinella bets (there's no distinction between second and third place here, so quinella is just picking two of the top three finishers). It's not exciting to pick a favorite, especially a prohibitive favorite, and so quinella betting allows me to bet on a "I have a good feeling about this one" horse to Show (top-3 finish) but with a substantially higher payoff, based solely on the inclusion of the prohibitive favorite to Show as well.

The paper concludes that, psychology of gambling aside, betting patterns more strongly correlate to systematic misunderstanding of very bad odds. This seems to be the more quantitative explanation, anyway, which I find reassuring. Whatever motivates people's individual decisions to gamble, collectively, it's more about our inability to rationally understand a probability of 1/80 than it is about devaluing breaking even in favor of that 1/80 longshot.

Cool part #2: in a footnote, the authors observe that while their data from the US, UK, and Australia shows the same unbalanced payoffs (within confidence intervals), data from HK and Japan does not. Which means I can bet on medium-range to longshot horses (say 3:1 to 20:1) here with more confidence that collective misperception is not dragging my odds downward.

Yep, nothing quite like reading and then summarizing an academic article for fun to start a monday off right!

in which I go to Shenzhen

What better way to celebrate a multi-entry visa (unlimited trips in for the next six months) than to use it, right? So it was a lazy sunday afternoon (I slept in), and I figured, well, why not?

It turns out that, adding in time to pass through customs and immigration, it takes the same amount of time to go from campus to Hong Kong island and from campus to Shenzhen. I learned some other things too:

1. I can't read simplified Chinese (jiantizi) for shit. Seriously. I guess I didn't really try that hard to learn them when I was taking 51A, back like more than three years ago, but still, I was stunned at how few simplified characters I could actually identify. I gotta ask the putonghua department here to make me a crib sheet or something, cause without the characters that are different in simplified, my level of Chinese-language comprehension drops from "one and a half semesters" to "next to nothing".

2. The only thing that's keeping me sane here, trying to learn Canto after knowing some putonghua, is that *nobody* in HK uses putonghua. So I think I've just kind of layered the new pronunciations and grammar (especially particles) over the top of the putonghua vocabulary I can remember. Result: in Shenzhen, people on the street may speak one dialect, or they may speak the other. Some may speak both, but conduct business in one or the other. I cannot form a SINGLE SENTENCE without using some awful unintelligible combination of both. Simple sentences in putonghua that I tried came out with a Cantonese "la" on the end. And I don't have the vocabulary to say anything of substance in Canto, so I slip in putonghua words. Basically, I felt bad for anyone trying to communicate information with me. But at least I didn't expect them to speak english, because they generally didn't.



3. I spontaneously found and ate at Din Tai Fung Shenzhen. It was pretty good--better than the Hung Hom one here, but nowhere near as good as the Arcadia one. The waitress was very nice, though, and tried to be understanding when I asked her dumb questions in my Canto/putonghua garble. ("Xiao jie, zhe shi wei jing ma?" "Bu shi. Shi [something I didn't understand]." -- I tried to ask if the shaker of off-white powder in the condiment tray was MSG. But I think she said it was sweetener of some kind... is that the "la" in "suan la tong"?)

4. The people who did speak english mostly tried to sell me prostitutes. Apparently, *everything* is cheaper in China or the regulations aren't as strict (probably because unlike HK, it's all illegal, so it's all under the table) or something, because there were more than a few people standing on the street in the neighborhoods by the train station selling people. One exchange:
middle-aged woman who I would call "auntie": "Siu je! Siu je! M-goi, siu je?" ["young lady! young lady! excuse me, young lady!"]
me: "?" thinking, oh, the gender-neutral pronoun in chinese and all the trouble it causes. wait, that's not a pronoun...
lady: "young girl, you like? siu je?"
me: "uh, miu-a" [I don't want it at all]
lady: "haha, hou, hou, miu-a" ["good (impressed), (that I'm using a Canto expression)"] "siu je a?"
me: "miu-a." and then I walked away, with her following me. And then I hurried up, and she stopped. I though, well, that was really weird, but I guess at least she spoke to me in Canto, not english...

This other guy came up to me later in the afternoon and engaged me in English. "Hi, how are you doing?" to which I replied, "Fine, how are you?" And then he followed with, "You like girl for set? Young girl?" I was confused, and then remembered that Cantonese speakers, especially, but native Chinese speakers in general don't aspirate final consonants enough. "Uh, bu yao" ["I don't want it"]. He laughed, too, at my Chinese, but at least he didn't ask again. I feel like when telling people off or bargaining, switching into my bad Chinese makes it clear that I want my point to be taken seriously--like I'm clearly making more effort to indicate how much I don't want the thing, so they shouldn't keep badgering me.

5. Shenzhen is like the biggest city you've never heard of. I was looking at the almost-entirely-brand-new skyline, and imagining a show on TLC or something:
"Project Shenzhen": competing teams of architects have ten years to build enough housing and services for seven million people. Go!!!!
And the result looks something like what Shenzhen actually looks like: a lot of new stuff, no real master-plan, oh, and seven million people.

6. Hong Kong is so so so different from China in the aesthetic qualitative way it feels. Not just the HK island expat-filled part, because that's obvious. If Shenzhen is (as I've read) indicative of the new developments in China, it's different than anywhere I've been before ever. Eight-lane streets running between skyscrapers but only one-and-a-half metro lines. Tons of buses but even major streets are poorly lit from dusk onward. Enough haze to make vivid sunsets, which isn't so different, I guess.

7. It's only the second place I've been where english is not the first or second most-common language. In Shenzhen, it's putonghua and Canto--most people seemed to know at least a little of both, but not necessarily anything else. While most people in Moscow didn't know any second language, so it was pretty communication-hostile, I'm pretty sure english was second. So: the only other such place was Lake Balaton, where, since neither Patrick nor I spoke any German, we had to do our best with Hungarian everywhere.

Compared to Shenzhen, trying to speak Canto in Hong Kong feels like cheating, because you can be 80% sure that your listener will, if the need arises, be able to switch to english.

I want to go back (so much more to see). Compared to excursions around the HKSAR, every minute there felt just a little bit precarious and adventurous.

I'm famous!

Actually, that's not really true. But I got talked about on another blog! And by that, I mean, the friend I played mahjong with mentioned me in her blog. At any rate, what I got mentioned for *was* pretty awesome. We were playing a casual, two-player version of HK-style mahjong (which apparently already has the fewest rules of the major regional variants). I got a Special Victory Condition Win, the most rare and famous of them all, the Thirteen Wonders.


It's pretty awesome, I have to admit: the 1 and 9 tiles from each suit, all four winds, all three honors, and a fourteenth tile that pairs with one of the others. It was a really exciting game playing to draw it (since you can't use any of the normal game mechanics to pick up your opponent's discards), and it looks way pretty.

The only problem is, like hitting your best golf shot at the driving range, we were playing this informal two-player version, and no local people were watching, which would clearly have made me seem cooler and less awkward and foreign (right?). And, of course, as a math major, the likelihood of achieving the same feat in a four-player game is at least 3 or 4 times more rare, so it's not quite as much of an achievement. I would say it's like hitting for the cycle in an exhibition game or something--really cool, but somehow unquantifiably not as cool as doing it on the Big Stage, whatever that may be. Oh, and I can only imagine how silly it sounds that I'm trying to describe a game played (most famously by old people and housewives) with tiles using metaphors pulled from 'real' sports. Well, now that I look at it, golf and baseball are on the 'game' side of the SPORT--GAME continuum, so maybe they aren't so badly stretched after all... I figure that at least people will respect my mahjong achievements more than my badminton game (which, as I found out on monday, is pretty good if a little bit rusty).

Oh, and I'm getting sick. But I got Skype. So skype me! (I'm in Hong Kong! And I have a webcam! Which has awesome/awful 'glitter' and 'fire' effects!)

*sigh* of relief

Near as I can tell, I managed to avoid jinxing myself.

So, to make a relatively long story short, I managed to hear an awful lot of rumor an innuendo about Mainland China visas. I tried to do some research over the summer, but I couldn't figure out what the rules were for transit from HK to the PRC (since we have HK work visas), so I figured I'd hold off til I got here.

Well, needless to say, what I heard while here was confusing and often contradictory. I got some advice from some Canadian teaching assistants, that Japan Travel Agency was the cheapest, but when I went, they told me rather pointedly that they "don't do that for American nationals". So I figured the best bet was China Travel. Except that they have a million locations, and, like many other businesses here that are price-flexible, prices vary from branch to branch, sometimes dramatically. I went to one, and they wanted something like HK$2000, which was, let's just say, way more than I was willing to pay. I talked to a bunch of different travel agents at the Sha Tin Travel Plaza, and most of them pegged things more in the $900 - $1400 range, which was more reasonable (US nationals pay by far the highest fee to apply for a China visa, although the UK and six or seven other countries also have 'penalty rates').

Let me introduce another dynamic into the discussion: number of entries. I have M(多) entries, but this was by no means assured. My initial understanding was that Americans were required to have a single- or double-entry visa used up in their passport before they could apply for a multi-entry. And then, I heard that capricious consular officials might offer a multi-entry for your first time if they were having a good day. And then, China Travel (Sha Tin) told me that, as a Hong Kong Legal Resident (with ID card), all I needed was the name and address of someone in China to get the coveted multi-entry.

So I went home, gathered my materials, and got Wendy's contact information, for which I am quite grateful. I returned, only to have the employee insist that "it cannot be done, not for American". I, calmly as possible, told her that the last time I was here they told me differently. So she called over her supervisor, who made a phone call on my behalf to... somewhere (it was in the evening, so I can't image who would be working on visa stuff). She looked at my passport, read off my HK visa number, the works, and then told me that I needed a letter from my employer or a business card to prove my reputable employment (I had, sadly, left all my business cards at home that day). So I had to go home again. And bring more stuff. This time, I figured I should just play it safe and take some extra stuff with me so that I would have any and all proofs they could possibly request. After the same sort of putting-off I got the time before ("We can't give you multi-entry" "But you said you could last time" "Oh. Let me ask my supervisor."), we made it to the actual application form. As I filled it out, she told me I didn't need the name of my inviter (so hopefully they won't call you, Wendy, and ask personal reference-type questions), I didn't need the name card, I only needed a copy of my HK residents' card and a passport-sized photo. Which I forgot. So, for a nominal, fee, she rummaged behind the counter, found an ancient-looking four-lens polaroid with a large flashbulb on top, and her co-worker had to stop helping other customers so that she could hold a sheet of white posterboard behind my head for the background. It was quite a scene. And then, once the photo developed, it turned out that you could see the co-workers hands holding the posterboard up, and so it had to be retaken. I can only hope that the people passing by outside, in line, and being helped at other desks found it amusing. But all that, plus HK$1140, plus seven working days' processing time, and I have myself unlimited trips to China for the next six months!


Ta-da! (Hopefully, I took off enough vital numbers that I won't be subject to identity theft or prosecution or anything)

some small victories

I bought a mahjong set at the Yau Ma Dei night market. It's quite nice (although the case it came in seems to be used, the tiles themselves are new), and it required some bargaining. Unlike *all* of my previous negotiable-price failures, I came into this one with information gleaned from previous indecisive attempts to buy a set. Suggestion: in all future bargaining endeavors, know how much a similar thing costs somewhere else. Don't ask the proprietor how much the item costs, instead throwing out a price probably 25% less than what it cost elsewhere. They will flat-out refuse, possibly insinuate that you are stupid, show you other, smaller/lamer versions of product. Ask how much it actually costs, express dismay, offer first compromise price (a little larger than initial offer, but not too much). Proprietor will again refuse, expressing disdain for bargaining skills, make counter-offer. Pick price slightly below the average of your most recent offer and their most recent offer. Cross fingers. I got a set, priced at HK$238, for HK$180, and I'm pretty sure I didn't get ripped off too bad.

I think I have a multi-entry China visa. It's in processing, so I don't want to say too much and jinx it. Will update.

I struck up a conversation with the attractive young woman seated next to me on the night minibus last weekend. As you probably all know, I'm unhealthily curious about how I am perceived by others, and in HK, this resolves mostly into a question of racialization/guesses at national origin. Of course, most people just tell me I'm really tall and leave it at that. Or, as one kid in the elementary school asked, as though an interrogator, "Why you get so tall?" But this conversation, with the woman on the bus, was the exception. My lead-off question was, "Excuse me, do you play mahjong?" with the intention of asking her where to buy a table to play on. Her response was, "Oh! Are you Chinese American?" and it made my day. Maybe even made my week.

She then answered my question about the table by telling me about a little store in mong kok that sells mahjong things, like tables, giving me the name of the street it's on. Mong kok is of course so dense and ridiculous, and the street she gave me was a longer one, so I had little faith that I'd actually find it. But wednesday afternoon, I dragged Jane along after lunch to survey a few blocks and try to find it. The first three blocks were lower-level retail plus stalls in the street, so that you could only see about a third of what was being sold in one pass. Then, Fa Yuen Street turns into the street with all the athletic shoe stores, which is where I comparison-shopped for Nikes a couple months ago. Tucked into the middle of what was going to be the *last* block we were willing to search was a storefront, not even a retail space but a counter facing the street, that sold mahjong stuff. So I bought a table. And I took the set and the table to work this afternoon and played a little. It was great.

On tuesday, I took Laura's Spanish Language Corner shift because she was going in for surgery (good luck with convalescence!). I figured that nobody would show up, and if they did, they'd only have had two weeks of class, so it would be a lot of practicing "Como esta' Usted?" and possibly, maybe, me teaching them "Hola que tal" and "Sale" as useful expressions. As it turned out, one student came in and wanted to chat. And I'm not sure where, but she'd had the equivalent of maybe half a semester of spanish. So we got to chat about stuff, and I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I remembered. It almost made me want to volunteer to help teach spanish or something for the students here (since they're starting basically from square one). But it also made my day.

I also very nearly made it through a relatively complicated McDonalds order in Cantonese last night. I think I would have made it, too, if I had asked the cashier to repeat her repeating of my order more slowly, instead of giving her the blank look which caused her to call over her manager. Any practice is good practice, especially when I jeng hai sik siu siu a.