This web­site, devel­oped by stu­dents at 台灣政治大學, lets peo­ple buy and sell stocks of future events (for cur­rency used on the site only.) Peo­ple can buy stock at the cur­rent rate. The end stock price depends on the end result of the event, 100 for true events and 0 for false events and peo­ple win or lose cur­rency on the site depend­ing on the results. Its been very suc­cess­ful in pre­dict­ing past Tai­wan elec­tions such as 立委 elec­tions (I for­got the exact stats, some­thing like 90% cor­rect within 30 days and 95% within 10 days of the elect­ing or some­thing), although I’m not sure about pres­i­den­tial elec­tions since it’s such a high pro­file event I think many peo­ple who are not reg­u­lar users of the site may go and bid too, pos­si­bly affect­ing its accu­racy (I’m not sure if it does, just my own guesses.)

I don’t know if there are any US web­sites like this. I think there should be…“wisdom of the crowds” stuff is pretty pop­u­lar in the US too.…

I can’t fig­ure out how to com­bine these two graphs. Note there is a third party can­di­date with sig­nif­i­cant sup­port for a third party can­di­date, so the prob­a­bil­i­ties don’t add up to 100%). Also note that this set of stocks is for “prob­a­bil­ity of win­ning” not “per­cent­age of votes”, that’s a dif­fer­ent set of stocks. BTW the elec­tion date is 1÷14÷2012.

Show­ing on TV in Tai­wan…
It’s a really famous Japan­ese drama from a while ago. Its theme song is Hikari Utada’s “First Love,” which is part of the rea­son that song became so famous. I’ve heard of the drama but never knew what it was about. Actu­ally Japan­ese dra­mas about teacher and stu­dent rela­tion­ships seem to crop up from time to time…Anyway this just looks…so…wrong to me. I think its because west­ern soci­ety has a much stronger taboo for an adult hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with a minor (for what­ever rea­sons, at least some of which are very good rea­sons I think). Also the fact that the boy kind of looks like he’s 14 about years old the first time I watched the trailer…

(my google is in Chi­nese because google has fig­ured out I’m in Tai­wan and I don’t know how to change it) I get no results (XXX is my name):

您是不是要查： XX燕
找不到包含所有搜尋字詞的結果。

找不到和您的查詢「XXX」相符的資料

建議：

請檢查有無錯別字
請換用不同的查詢字詞
請改試較常用的字詞

I click on the link to XX燕 and I get 132,000 results!

約有 132,000 項結果 (搜尋時間：0.10 秒)

The first search result is:

XX燕有多少XX燕,XX燕同名同姓-人人网校内
全国有多少XX燕？查找和结识同名同姓的XX燕,从人人网校内开始。人人网是中国最大的实名社交网络，在人人网，找回你曾经的真情。

Click­ing on the link I get

XX燕在人人网上姓名为XX燕的用户有374人

With sam­ples of pro­file photos!

: How Chi­nese Con­sumers Are Trans­form­ing Every­thing
I sort of read the whole book (trans­lated to Chi­nese) while pass­ing by the book­store (in between the metro and the bus sta­tion) on the way home. I would have bought it and read it more slowly/carefully if I had unlim­ited funds for books (I wish, but then the house would have even more books), but there were just too many books in the book­store and I can only take home a few. The book is basi­cally about Chi­nese con­sumerism, but also Chi­nese cap­i­tal­ism and mate­ri­al­ism to some extent. It’s a pretty inter­est­ing book I think. It’s also writ­ten very well and well-researched, but also pretty easy to read. There isn’t any­thing that seems unsub­stan­ti­ated in it, most of the nar­ra­tive are well sup­ported and anti­dotes are not used as argu­ments only for your read­ing inter­est. There arn’t a lot of per­sonal opin­ions or pre­dic­tions by the author in the book, which is prob­a­bly a good thing but I’m used to read­ing books with a clear “the­sis” given at the end (which, for a book like this, would prob­a­bly go some­thing inter­est­ing but usu­ally so gen­eral it is basi­cally mean­ing­less, or prob­a­bly not true or not entirely true like “The future of Chi­nese consumerism/capitalism/blah/ is/depends on blah/blah/blah” or “China will change world con­sumerism this spe­cific way in the future blah blah blah”) and this book doesn’t have any­thing like that. The book does have good com­men­tary on Chi­nese soci­ety and cul­ture in rela­tion to its his­tory (mostly mod­ern his­tory if I remem­ber right) though. I guess it’s not a sur­prise that it’s writ­ten by an aca­d­e­mic (Oxford Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor of mod­ern Chi­nese his­tory). I’m kind of sur­prised that it was pub­lished last year, because its pop cul­ture ref­er­ences seem kind of dated to me (ie. F4’s pop­u­lar­ity in China, F4 just seems so early 2000s to me.)

BTW I’m watch­ing TV in the back­ground right now and appar­ently Miyazaki has a new movie out and show­ing in Tai­wan. I still remem­ber about 10 years ago when he said he was going to retire after mak­ing “Princess Mononoke,” so I’ve been sub­con­sciously sur­prised every time he has a new movie out even though I know he’s still mak­ing movies, I sort of imag­ine every movie he makes as his last. Movie looks good though, I kind of want to watch it. It’s not a fantasy/mythology movie, it looks like it takes place in mod­ern Japan about ordi­nary young peo­ple, it’s been a (long) while since he has made one that isn’t but his sto­ries of ordi­nary Japan­ese peo­ple are just as good as his fan­tasy titles.

I really like this mv. The Eng­lish lyrics are ok I think, but at least it gets the idea across (also notice it rhymes and singing it is actu­ally pos­si­ble)

Right now I’m (briefly) con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of going to Kaoh­si­ung for the Jay Chou con­cert (for me and my sis­ter):
jay chou only has $2800 ntd (and up) tick­ets left for his con­cert
(the high speed) train tick­ets to kaoh­si­ung is $1490 (2 hours)
one way
$1490 * 4 + $2800 * 2 = $ 11 560
11 560台幣 = 382.67068 美元

That’s $141 USD per per­son. mmmmmmmmmmmmm.…

I also also found a Soda­green con­cert I can pos­si­bly go to. Tick­ets start sell­ing on 11/22.

or like, the day of. This event is lit­er­ally going on *right now*
Oh well, it’s not like 新竹 is that close to where I live…(Note: this event has this band from the 清華大學 in Bei­jing + this other band from the 清華大學 in Hsingchu + Soda­green from nei­ther of those uni­ver­si­ties). It’s like how I found out Sodagreen’s Star­bucks sign­ing event in 西門町 on the day off (way too late), and I found out about Mayday’s con­cert in Taipei Arena in Decem­ber today, like 4 days after the ticket sold out (the tick­ets sold out in one day. 7 whole nights of con­certs! 7! That’s 90000 tick­ets!). And then I found out about Sodagreen’s album pre­order gift after the pre­order dead­line…
Jay Chou has a con­cert in Kaoh­si­ung in Decem­ber, there appar­ently are still a few tick­ets left (in the more expen­sive sec­tion), but I think it’s too far…

「有些人說我們的夢想不切實際，
但我覺得有不切實際的夢想才是實際的根本。

有時候我會覺得，你們，
好像跟我們有一樣的夢想，
而我們只是代表你們實現這個夢想。
如果你們有一些夢想，蘇打綠在這邊可以做到，
你們一定也可以。

請你一定要相信自己，一定要接受、喜歡自己的樣子，
一定要讓自己變成你真心會喜歡的樣子，

如果你想要做的，
不是長輩所控制你的樣子，
不是社會所規定你的樣子，
請你一定要為自己勇敢的站出來，
溫柔的推翻這個世界，
然後把世界變成我們的！」

鄧麗君原唱
This is from their 2007 con­cert at Taipei Arena. I think this is the first “large” con­cert event. 青峰 starts cry­ing in the mid­dle of the song :‘
Also I noticed that in this con­cert when­ever the vio­laist (is that a word?)/keyboard holds his viola with his chin when he’s play­ing the piano. I know that if you like your viola you really don’t want to put it on the ground, but it still seems like a lot of work…

From songs in the album “summer/fever.” Actu­ally the per­son they’re mak­ing fun of is the oppo­site of fat. Some­how doesn’t seem very nice still…but it is funny…

跟著蘇打綠sodagreen一起上通告(下)
at :35 he says he wants to be a flower fairy and starts singing a fairy song…

“Mak­ing of” their last last album, “summer/fever” which appar­ently was recorded in Lon­don. This is part of a series…there are quite a few of them…