us-china relations

President Bush, what are you doing?

The more the days go by the more I find myself saying that to the digital bouncing head on television that is our President. President Bush's actions abroad range from hawkish pushes for war to strange olive branches of peace. Today Bush met with Chinese President Hu Jintao. The big thing they discussed was American <-> Chinese Trade. After reading a few articles, a few papers, I found the whole thing slightly humorous and actually quite scary.

"In a day of talks, the president called on China to expand religious, political and social freedoms and urged steps to reduce Beijing’s huge trade surplus with the United States. President Hu Jintao promised steps to resolve economic frictions.

The two leaders conferred at the Great Hall of the People on the edge of Tiananmen Square, and Hu said they both sought an outcome of “mutual benefit and win-win results.”

America exports very little to China. Yes that figure is around $35 billion, growing every year, but take a few things into account. Middle class Chinese are becoming wealthier and... you really must look at what we're exporting. In my opinion the biggest area of growth in China is trending towards consumer goods, with a rise in middle class income, middle class Chinese have been salivating for luxury items. Unfortunately for us, these aren't predominantly American. Who are the makers of luxry items? D&G, Prada, Gucci, Salvatore Ferragamo... all European. What do we export to China? We export, airplanes, power generation equipment, medicine/medical devices, and electronics.

Maybe it's me, but I see a big problem here. Airplanes, how many do airliners buy each year from Boeing, etc.? Not a whole lot, and the thing is they aren't things that must be upgraded every year, so until China develops a capitalist environment where airline companies line up to compete with each other, this recent 70 737's to China is going to be a one time deal... at least for now. Electronics? Being an electrical engineer who is looking for a job in a few months, I see the big problem, we are doing most, if not all of our electronic manufacturing abroad. It's cheaper, of course we would do that. HP and every laptop brand we have has its laptops manufactured and designed in China/Taiwan. China/Taiwan now have the most advanced pcb and chip fabrication plants on Earth, and we rely on them, they are like the OPEC of silicon.

They can manufacture their own, they are very competent at designing their own, what's stopping them from making the entire industry their own? Not a whole lot, maybe a few MBA's with vision. Bush tells China we want trade parity, we want China to revalue their currency, the problem extends beyond trade parity and currency, it stretches to, how long does China actually need us to be a trading partner? The top 3 exporters to China are their neighbors, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, why require the culturally, politics, ambition disimilar America to come in and say what needs to be done? America is lucky our medical device ingenuity is so strong or we really would be in the red.

I think the only thing they are missing right now is imagination and leadership. Once those components are there, it's not a "world is flat" scenario championed by Friedman, it's back to cold war type spheres of influence. The US will have Latin America, South America, Canada, Europe. Europe will have... Europe and the US. Africa well... I don't know anything about their trade. Asia will have Asia. Can you imagine having 3-4 EU type establishments? The EU, the AmU,AsU... It'll be like playing Risk.

“The spirit of the Lord is very strong inside your church,” Bush said.

In the church’s guest book, Bush wrote “May God bless the Christians of China.”

Why do I cringe at that? Not so much because I have a problem with organized religion in general, but because of the pointed content of the statement. When the President addresses our religiously diverse country, he says "May God bless America"...not "Christians of America". God only blesses the Christians of China? I know it's only a guestbook, but that seems to be a political slap in the face, a faux pas if you will.

With so much attention diverted to Middle Eastern Terror, are we spending enough effort strengthening our own ability to stay competitive at home? We keep talking about increasing jobs, let's be honest, the jobs that are being created aren't the jobs that are going to keep us afloat on the international boxing ring. We have to be at the head of technology again or we're screwed. (A lot of Asian women who were polled said they weren't interested in buying the Motorola Razr... if we can't even sell cool now, what can we sell? Surely not bootleg Hollywood films)

blog status & probability

I wish I had something to write about. I just wanted to have something new on this site to let people know that I'm not dead. I've done a lot of really fun things... if you could ever consider school work fun. First off, as of 20 minutes ago, my main page has a slightly new and cleaner look and my resume is updated. If by some off chance someone is looking to hire me, my pdf resume is available to oggle.

As for school, I think what I've been doing is extremely interesting. I've been modeling neurons in the brain as electrical circuits. The most baffling part, and Professor Lazar could give you the mathematical details, is that we discover that the neurons and dendritic trees in your brain are non-linear circuits BUT they can be very accurately modeled by linear circuits. Go figure, the man is a genius. It really makes you think though, how good the model we are using is. We modeled the neurons as time encoding machines, they hit a threshold and spike and we take the spike times and recover a signal. You really must wonder how closely organic structures like neurons behave just like... common electrical circuits, like a sample and hold circuit, how the dendritic trees and axons are like antennas.

The more you delve into this, the more you wonder how much is "intelligent design" and how much is trial and error that nature slowly progressed towards. I didn't do so well in my Probability class, but the more you look at the world as probabilistic events, the less you, well, at least I, believe in God. Observe the initial example and I'll get to something else later:

0th order Markov (each character generated independently and identically distributed with frequencies matching English text):

OCRO HLI RGWR NMIELWIS EU LL NBNESEBYA TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL

1st order Markov: (each character generated with frequencies depending on previous character)

ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY TOBE SEACE CTISBE

2nd order Markov: (each character generated with frequencies depending on two previous characters)

IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BERS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMONSTRURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE

3rd order Markov: (each character generated with frequencies depending on three previous characters)

THE GENERATED JOB PROVIDUAL BETTER TRAND THE DISPLAYED CODE ABOVERY UPONDULTS WELL THE CODERST IN THESTICAL IT DO HOCK BOTHE MERG INSTATES CONS ERATION NEVER ANY OF PUBLE AND TO THEORY EVENTIAL CALLEGAND TO ELAST BENERATED IN WITH PIES AS IS WITH THE

This is the power of Markov Chains. Markov Chains is the key behind genetics and proteins. DNA sequences are largely iterations of markov chains, after you reach a high enough order, the coherency and meaningfulness of things is almost ridiculous. There was a point in studying for my genomics midterm that it dawned on me that Markov Chains are glaring evidence against the existence of God. Too bad it's 6:30 am and I don't remember the details so I can walk everyone through the thought process. Maybe some other time. In the meantime...

I was trying to generate a short Matlab function yesterday that would allow me to plot a set of cosines to approximate output intensity degradation with angular misalignment for a LED. What I got was a loop screw up. Cosines produce some crazy shit.
This is how simple the code was:
clear all;
theta=0:0.01:pi;
m=0:.5:10;
for n=1:length(m)
for l=1:length(theta)
a(n,l)=(cos(theta(l)))^m(n);
end
end
plot(a)

This is the end result: eek! how about that for "intelligent design"?