Friday, 15 May 2015

The Acquittal Rate in Japan, China & Canada (Is Anyone Ever "Not Guilty"?)

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Very nearly nobody gets a "not guilty" verdict in China or Japan, and while some might appeal to "Cultural Determinism...
Wednesday, 13 May 2015

読, Kanji of the Week

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Japanese 読 differs from its traditional Chinese counterpart (讀) in having 壳 on the right-hand side.  Graphically speaking, the Chinese sy...
Tuesday, 12 May 2015

The Gini Coefficient in Asia (Social Inequality in China, Laos, etc.)

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Any article relating statistics that originate from the government of the People's Republic of China has to include some kind of cav...
Sunday, 10 May 2015

Military Spending Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall

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There were significant "peace dividends" in the U.S. military budget after 1989, and (perhaps contrary to popular belief) Obama ...
Saturday, 9 May 2015

The first steps toward native language curricula (finally, in 2015)

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This is news in 2015: Montana is providing support for indigenous language education, for the first time.  It's a change that comes ...
Tuesday, 5 May 2015

The Overly-Familiar Brink of Thai Succession Politics

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Princess Sirindorn appears on the (ubiquitous) 100-Baht bill in 2015.  Although this isn't her first appearance in Thai numismatics, ...
Monday, 4 May 2015

"Real" Buddhism: Book vs. Folk

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I received a request to make expansions to an already-long article.  I tried to make these as brief as possible, and in now glancing at t...
Sunday, 3 May 2015

Thomas More's Utopia in Chinese & Japanese Translation

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There are many strange discontinuities and asymmetries in the "East meets West" equation, and these become even stranger when yo...
Saturday, 2 May 2015

Ras Kass on Growing Up with the Encyclopedia

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About nine minutes and 45 seconds into the tape, he's asked what kind of encyclopedia he grew up with. "Oh, so you was a Britan...
Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Wage Growth (or Lack Thereof) in Japan & Canada

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The C.B.C. had a rather hilarious headline in 2014: Canada's dismal wage growth still better than most of G20 (Source) .  Wage stagna...