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Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

theguardian.com

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Re: Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

#211

Post by dylandrop »

dreamfactory wrote: post #172
dylandrop wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good to hear. My only point about protesting in America was that it's very ingrained in our culture to protest, even for small issues. I didn't really know much about Chinese protesting culture, but it's good to hear they do it in large numbers.

As far as I understand, public unrest is one of the greatest fears of Chinese leadership, hence tight control and censorship. That may speak volumes about the willingness of their public to take control along with protesting (as opposed to the West where protest is seen as a safety valve and therefore encouraged in proscribed forms).

Well, I hope that's true, but I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea "they have an oppressive government thus they must be able to take control with protesting". It could be that the government feels the need to be this way because they know just how screwed up everything (pollution, persecution, etc.) is, and are oppressive as a safety measure.

Re: Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

#212

Post by dreamfactory »

dylandrop wrote: post #211
dreamfactory wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand, public unrest is one of the greatest fears of Chinese leadership, hence tight control and censorship. That may speak volumes about the willingness of their public to take control along with protesting (as opposed to the West where protest is seen as a safety valve and therefore encouraged in proscribed forms).

Well, I hope that's true, but I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea "they have an oppressive government thus they must be able to take control with protesting". It could be that the government feels the need to be this way because they know just how screwed up everything (pollution, persecution, etc.) is, and are oppressive as a safety measure.

...think that's what I said - the oppression is a response to perception of a greater evil of instability. Scratch any country's leadership and you'll get the same kind of result. The question is whether that is justified, and historically seems to be more usually a case of paranoia, micro-management, and control freakery.

Re: Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

#213

Post by saalweachter »

dreamfactory wrote: post #208
saalweachter wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on your black swan comment?

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/24/whats-next-...

Yeah, anytime someone says "once in a million years" and isn't an astronomer I would doubt those numbers. My money would be on "the number we need so people don't freak out".

On the other hand, it's also easy to overstate the magnitude of a disaster. To the best of my knowledge, no one actually died of radiation exposure from the accident (and probably no one will at this point). There are expected to be a number of deaths (somewhere between 15 and 1100) from increased cancer rates in the larger population. I would hope these weren't included in the "one in a million" claim.

Re: Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

#214

Post by sliverstorm »

dreamfactory wrote: post #209
sliverstorm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a socially stable option. Not because we want cheap gadgets, but because of the social imbalance. Also from an ethical point of view, it's not very fair to deny them the chance to become a developed nation.

People don't sit around on their bums for too long - it's just not in our nature. If they weren't slaving away in factories they might end up as a society that primarily produces cultural capital (huge social stability there) or they might develop a service-based economy. In the wider scheme, Chinese manufacturing is probably more important to the west than China.

How important Chinese manufacturing is to China has little to do with the ramifications of perennially feeding a country for nothing.

Re: Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

#215

Post by Lagged2Death »

SiVal wrote: post #205
Lagged2Death wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't brown air; it's a brown print ... chimneys artificially crowded ... taken at sunset. You may be right, it may be a sepia print. I don't know that much about sepia. GIMP shows 26K unique colors, and plenty of information in all three layers when decomposed to HSV or LAB. I would have thought a sepia print would be closer to monochrome. I can assure you the brown skies were real, and that there's not much "a…

I commented on the photo, not your memories. I didn't comment on your memories, because I had nothing to say about them. They sounded right to me, which wasn't worth a comment. As a photographer, there were some things that jumped out at me immediately about that photo, though. I commented on it and stand by those comments. Since you apparently thought I was talking about you and not the spin techniques of The Atlant…

I commented on the photo, not your memories.

That's a really narrow construction of what you said. I said "I remember brown skies just like this" and you suggested that 1) The color is fake 2) I might imagine that scene with blue skies 3) the Atlantic has an axe to grind and 4) other cities have "the real thing." What am I supposed to think?

The photos were part of an EPA project specifically conceived to "document subjects of environmental concern." There was editorial intent, certainly, but nobody at The Atlantic had anything to do with it. This is all explained on The Atlantic's page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCUMERICA

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/collections/...

I'm trying to find out if the photo is in color or not. Certainly most of the DOCUMERICA project was in color, certainly every other photo chosen for this Atlantic feature was color, and certainly the photographer seems to have worked almost entirely with color at the time:

http://research.archives.gov/search?expression=Aleksandrowic...

It would not surprise me, at this point, to learn that the photo was in color. I don't think there is anything artificial-looking about it, it matches my memories pretty well. Yes, it has a nearly monochromatic look to it, but some scenes are really like that. Unfortunately the National Archives record doesn't seem to indicate whether the photo was in color or not:

http://research.archives.gov/description/550175

Do you have any information about scans of sepia photos? How many unique colors might be expected? I have tried doing a color count on several old photos that I'm confident started as real sepia-tint, and found color counts in the 6K-13K range, significantly fewer than the 26K that appear in the Clark Avenue Bridge photo. But I don't think that's conclusive.

Re: Schoolchildren ordered indoors as air pollution cloaks Shanghai

#216

Post by Lagged2Death »

Lagged2Death wrote: post #215
SiVal wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I commented on the photo, not your memories. I didn't comment on your memories, because I had nothing to say about them. They sounded right to me, which wasn't worth a comment. As a photographer, there were some things that jumped out at me immediately about that photo, though. I commented on it and stand by those comments. Since you apparently thought I was talking about you and not the spin techniques of The Atlant…

I commented on the photo, not your memories. That's a really narrow construction of what you said. I said "I remember brown skies just like this " and you suggested that 1) The color is fake 2) I might imagine that scene with blue skies 3) the Atlantic has an axe to grind and 4) other cities have "the real thing." What am I supposed to think? The photos were part of an EPA project specifically conceived to "document…

There is one clue: Sepia (AFAIK) is a process applied to silver-based prints, but the National Archives record for the photo lists its media type as a slide. If that's right, it's not sepia. And since the brown color wouldn't be from a black-and-white slide either, I think the most likely explanation is that it's a color photo.
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