review

Why Chinese Mothers are NOT Superior (aka Why Chinese Fathers are Not Needed)

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Amy Chua with daughters Louisa and Sophia

Yale Law Professor Amy Chua recently released a memoir called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Talk about cheesy titles. Essentially, it was about the so-called “Chinese” method of raising children that was very strict, and why it was superior, as her Wall Street Journal essay (Why Chinese Mothers are Superior, Amy Chua in WSJ, Jan 8 2011).

Essentially, it’s how one clever woman is playing the race card in on offense, in a sly way to keep tension from building while generating debate and getting her lots of money and attention. This book would be nothing but for the hype generated by these racial insinuations.

If you want the details on the no sleepover, no dates, trashing your children, threatening to burn your children’s toys, forcing them to take either piano or violin and not settling for As in school, you can read the WSJ link above or the multitude of other related articles like this one from Canada’s Globe & Mail (Why Chinese Parenting is Best, G&M Jan 11 2011).

Note again the racial insinuation in the title.

That’s because its supposed “self-deprecating” nature that was in good jest, according to Amy, is all hear say and not backed up by anything but her opinion. She is presenting an argument on what isn’t “visible”, concentrating on what is, which is the successful products of the method. But how many have been failed by the method and had their lives ruined, and who will never be known?

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This Blog’s 2010 Performance in Review, Courtesy of WordPress.com

Digital Citizen 5 Comments

The performance summary below was a nice little features the people at WordPress.com did for their blogs. Now if only I could find a way to turn it into some monetary income.

WordPress.com should set some traffic rewards where you can get credits to use to purchase their services, like storage space, or domain mapping. I pay for these things just to make this blog function the way I want it to. To think, I donate all this time to work on this personal interest, and people came here as much as they did (2.3+ million page views and about 700,000 downloads), and I still had to pay money to maintain it.

That small possible improvement aside, in my opinion, I would like to genuinely thank WordPress.com for all the hard work they do to provide such a wonderful blogging platform! I did do a review of most of the other well-known platforms before deciding on using WordPress.com and I am glad I did!

The stats helpers at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

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Testing SoundCloud for WordPress.com with My Own Music

Digital Citizen 6 Comments

This is my own song, uploaded for the purposes of testing out the SoundCloud music player features newly integrated into WordPress.com blogs. Please do have a listen while reading some general descriptions of the SoundCloud platform following to see those features in action. I wrote the song, but it was beautifully sung by Lis Soderberg, with background parts, recording and mixing all done by the very talented Allister Bradley in the summer of 2008 at Humber College. I just strummed on a guitar. Lyrics are at the bottom. 🙂

Please click here for the guitar and ukulele tabs PDF containing lyrics,  chords and notes for The Comparison Song

Up till Aug 2009, there wasn’t a music player, and not one with social media features, on WordPress.com blogs. If you wanted to share audio files with such features, your best bet was probably to make a “static video”. You know, those “videos” with just one image and sound? Either that or get a space upgrade to be able to upload MP3 files, but there wasn’t a real music player with it

SoundCloud logo (I like it!)

Well, I’m so happy to see WordPress.com finally has a system to integrate sound media files into its blogs the way video was been integrated for a while! They chose SoundCloud.com as their platform, the way they had chosen VodPod for videos.

“[SoundCloud is] …a really useful service that is part Flickr for music, part professional music collaboration hub. Artists such as Beck, Moby and Sonic Youth now use the service to distribute tracks through their blogs and connect with their fans.”
— WordPress.com blog, Aug 13 2009

More than just another free music player, though, SoundCloud has some quite awesome features.

  • You can leave comments at specific points in the track so you don’t have to go find the time, or try to describe it awkwardly, etc.
  • You can just click a share button to share it on Facebook and various other social media or social bookmarking sites! That’s very nice!
  • The sharing of music otherwise among members is similar to the combination of notification on Facebook, and Inbox notifications, on your account via SoundCloud’s side. You can “follow” people like on Twitter to get the info via newsfeed, or get notice similar to a tag or email sent to you and/or your email off the site.
  • There is even code provided for people to embed it into their blogs and websites, with the player included! That’s really cool!
  • Their music player is like “fab five” man! You can also control lots of privacy features, and you get your own URL for your account on their site that the public may also visit like how MySpace works.
  • A free account can be had with 10 tracks for sharing, an Inbox, detailed statistics, viewing, privacy and other features of popular music and video sites at least as good as most of those other sites.

The WordPress folks really picked a fantastic platform in SoundCloud! Well done!

Of course, you should not be uploading copyrighted material that isn’t yours to SoundCloud. That was to be expected. But how nice, was it then, that I just happened to have a song I had written and recorded in the past to use? I don’t devote enough time to my singing/songwriting, and I don’t exactly go pimping my music a lot, even to many of my friends. So here’s hoping there’s something new here for some of them, and you, to enjoy, aside from the tech review.

I will be further checking out SoundCloud’s features in the upcoming weeks and months. It’s given me a whole new set of motivation to write more songs and record more. In the meanwhile, if you want to know more, you can take the tour on their site.

I would highly recommend it!

LYRICS

I could compare you to a summer’s day,
Or, if you prefer, a winter’s night.
I could compare you to the moon unphased,
Or the sun at dawn, noon or in twilight.
All lovely things I can compare you to,
But there’s not one that can compare to you.

I could compare you to the sweetest tune,
Or, if you prefer, the sweetest kiss.
I could compare you to a sacred rune,
Or the lores, that tell of eternal bliss.
All lovely things I can compare you to,
But there’s not one that can compare to you.

Choose any flower that blooms in the spring,
Or any leaf that turns in the fall.
Choose stars, or rainbows, angels, songs birds sing,
Or the sky, or sea – any thing at all!
All lovely things I can compare you to,
But there’s not one that can compare to you.

No, there’s not one that can compare to you.

07.?.2003 – 07.31.04