I was interested and somewhat pleased to see that recently, there has been some discussion of lowering or eliminating the weight attached to English scores in college entrance exams in China. The Wall Street Journal China Real Time Report blog has a nice discussion of what has been happening: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/07/learning-english-may-be-losing-its-luster-in-china/ Much of the commentary I…
Author: camecamp
Reflecting on my time as an undergraduate at Caltech 反思我加州理工學院讀本科經歷
Why I wrote this I recently began to receive reminders about the Caltech Reunion Weekend scheduled for May 15-18, 2014. I would like to attend, but it would require a special trip back from Hong Kong. We’ll see. Combined with my involvement with undergraduate education for the last 17 years or so at UCLA and…
Presentations related to East Asian historical demography at IUSSP 2013 Busan
I’m trying to put together a list of sessions that include presentations focused on East Asian historical demography at the IUSSP meetings in Busan, South Korea, August 26 to September 31, 2013. Below is what I have found so far, copied and pasted from the IUSSP online programme. If the session is focused on East…
The future of marriage in China
Reading Leta Hong Fincher’s CNN piece on changes in women’s attitudes about marriage in China reminded me of a prediction that I have been making for the past two or three years to anyone who will listen: Within a decade, marriage patterns in mainland China will resemble those everywhere else in East Asia, with high…
More data doesn’t automatically lead to deeper understanding…
Finally, someone has very publicly thrown cold water on the wild claims made for the potential of ‘big data’. I like the title: “Why Big Data is Not Truth.” It seems like every week now, I hear or read about someone in the news, typically an engineer or a computer scientist but very rarely a social…
Opening old Excel files in STATA 12
I ran into some importing old Excel files into STATA 12. Since I thought others would probably be encountering the same problem, I decided to write a blog post about it. We’re getting ready to produce a draft release of our China Multigenerational Panel Dataset – Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC) so that users can kick the tires…
First publication using the CMGPD-LN public release!
Congratulations to Wang Lei at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Labor and Population Economics! Wang Lei has just published what we believe is the first publication using the public release of the CMGPD-LN that doesn’t have one of us as a co-author: http://www.cnki.com.cn/Article/CJFDTotal-RKJJ201302006.htm The paper is a study of bachelorhood in northeast China…
2013 SJTU Summer Short Course: Social Demography
Social Demography Shanghai Jiaotong University Summer Short Semester 2013 7/1/2013-7/26/2013 Course description at Shanghai Jiaotong University website: http://summer.jwc.sjtu.edu.cn/web/sjtu/XJXQ/198690.htm INTRODUCTION This is an overview class intended to familiarize students with key concepts, major debates, and recent research in population and social demography. The focus will be on contemporary trends in marriage, childbearing, divorce, migration, and health…
Summer 2013 China Multigenerational Panel Dataset Workshop at SJTU (English announcement)
Summer 2013 China Multigenerational Panel Dataset Workshop Shanghai Jiaotong University Minhang Campus Shanghai, China July 15-19, 2013 中文版 The Center for the History and Society of Northeast China at the Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Humanities will hold its third summer China Multigenerational Panel Data workshop from July 15 to July 19. The workshop will…
Reflections on the NYT article on education in China
The New York Times recently published a very nice article on the challenges that a rural family in China faced as it sought an education for its daughter: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/business/in-china-families-bet-it-all-on-a-child-in-college.html?pagewanted=all I liked the article, and commend it to everyone’s attention. That said, reading the article inspired me to think about the importance of assessing the situation…