Seth’s blog

In downtown Berkeley I met a group of Chinese students from Beijing. They were entering freshmen at UC Berkeley.

They said there were 40 students like them — from Beijing, entering UC Berkeley. (At Tsinghua, there will be 400 entering freshmen from Beijing.) In all of China, 13 students were admitted to Harvard, about the same number to Yale and Princeton. One of them said she’d wanted to go to Northwestern but hadn’t gotten in. Had she gone to college in China, she might have gone to Renmin University, perhaps the #3 university in China.

Surely their parents were wealthy, yes. But they preferred an American college to a Chinese one for two main reasons: 1. They can choose whatever major they want. At Chinese universities students are often forced into a major they don’t want if their scores are high enough to get into a prestigious university but not high enough to get into the major they want at that university. 2. They believe that if they graduate from an American university they will have more opportunities. Where did they get the idea of coming to Berkeley? I asked. Online, they said. Their English was really good.

The “more opportunities” may not be as simple as they think. In Beijing I know a Chinese businesswoman who hired a recent college graduate. She’d gone to college in England, indicating that her parents were wealthy. The new worker turned out to be irresponsible and had to be fired. Perhaps her parents had spoiled her. In this businesswoman’s eyes, an overseas education may now be a negative.

• “ant tribes” near Beijing
• What exactly is umami?
• Is omega-3 an antidepressant?  “Initial analyses failed to clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of Omega-3 for all patients taking part in the study. Other analyses, however, revealed that Omega-3 improved depression symptoms in patients diagnosed with depression unaccompanied by an anxiety disorder.” Are they fooling themselves? Maybe not. My research suggests that morning faces can reduce only depression but also anxiety disorders. So if you have depression without an anxiety disorder it may indeed have a different cause.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

• Success is fickle: The case of Megan Fox. Is Big Pharma in the same situation? Lacking profound understanding of disease (just as Fox can’t act) . . .
• Excellent anonymous obituary of Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist. “Give power to the state and you end up with self-serving interest groups [he believed].” Via The Browser.
• David Healy on Big & Little Pharma (100 words). “Posted parcels are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.”
• Beijing Ikea. I shop there often. The cafeteria, with heavy silverware and live music, feels opulent. An industrial design student I know admired one of their chairs for three years and finally bought it as a prop for her final project. During exhibition of her work, unfortunately, visitors said, “What a beautiful chair.”

Thanks to Bruce Charlton and Paul Sas.

In Beijing, sky-high housing prices have left many couples who want to get married without the traditional requirement: an apartment they own. There’s a term for those who get married anyway: naked marriage. They are literally unprotected against rent increases. More abstractly, they are less comfortable than a couple rich enough to buy housing.

Two Chinese Idioms.

Black market = illegal. Grey market = “the trade of a commodity through distribution channels . . . unofficial, unauthorized, or unintended.”

In the evening, near the Wudaokou subway station in Beijing (where lots of students live), dozens of street vendors sell paperbacks ($1 each), jewelry, dresses, socks, scarves, electronic accessories, fruit, toys, shoes, cooked food, stuffed animals, and many other things. No doubt it’s illegal. When a police car approaches, they pick up and leave. Once I saw a group of policemen confiscate a woman’s goods.

What’s curious is how far vendors move when police approach. Once I saw the vendors on a corner, all 12 of them, each with a cart, move to the middle of the intersection — the middle of traffic — where they clustered. At the time I thought the traffic somehow protected them. Now I think they wanted to move back fast when the police car went away. Tonight, like last night, there’s a police car at that corner, the northeast corner of the intersection. No vendors there. The vendors who’d usually be there were now at the northwest corner. In other words, if a policeman got out of his car and walked across the street, he’d encounter all the vendors that he’d displaced.