Guangzhou Living 10 June 2006

This picture is an example of the neighborhood where an upper middle class family lives in Guangzhou. The interior is a three bedroom and one bathroom apartment. The kitchen and dining room is open to a cozy living room which seats 4 people comfortably. While the building’s exterior is well worn, the interior is newly refurbished with recessed lighting in the ceiling, marble surfaces, and wood floors.

Ideals or Institutions

On August 7^th, the Wall Street Journal reported how Li Yuanlong, a Chinese reporter, was sentenced to two years in prison for criticizing the Communist Party. Most of the brief article was dedicated to describing how Mr. Li had declared himself an American “in spirit” rather than bringing attention to the critiques for which Mr. Li was imprisoned. Fortunately, the organization Reporters Without Borders was more concerned about Mr. Li’s treatment and work rather than using his story to promote anti-Chinese sentiment. Their report on Mr. Li included details on his family as well as his interviews with poor children without access to education in Guizhou province. The story can be found here. While the government’s position is indefensible, the Wall Street Journal’s use of the story should inform readers on specific issues rather than promoting the illusion that most people of the world want to be American. As a patriotic American, I cannot deny that this story made me proud to live in country with our ideals, but we must remember that America does not have a monopoly on freedom. We should expect people to demand similar ideals of their government without implementing the same political or economic system as America. Clearly, some of our closest allies such as Britain do not share our distaste for socialized medicine or government ownership of industry. Our foreign policy needs to promote the values to which all people are entitled rather than building American institutions where they are not welcome.

White Mountains

This weekend we made our first visit to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. We began hiking on the Davis Path and camped off the side of the trail on a granite slab with our two beagles. Stories from more experienced hikers about the Appalachian Trail the White Mountains can be found here. The picture was taken in the vicinity of Mount Crawford.

Software Defined Radio

Software Defined Radio (SDR) represents a revolution in the way information services will be delivered. It allows for the possibility of mesh networking combined with bandwidth limited only by spectrum availability and communication standards. Unfortunately, the pentagon’s net centric warfare concept does not adequately address the possibility of transferring large amounts of digital information wirelessly under low power to avoid interception. Imagine the concept of frequency hopping applied to communication standards. Depending on the agility of the software, each word could be transmitted on different standards using vastly different parts of the spectrum. The first word may be sent on an SMS signal, the next in a Bluetooth signal, the next in shortwave PSK, and so on. This standard hopping technology could make interception difficult by requiring that the intercepting station be capable of recording the entire spectrum and processing every standard simultaneously. An intelligent program would be required to find possible combinations of standards in order to intercept the meaning of the message. While this technology seems to be years from consumer availability, open source projects such as the High Performance Software Defined Radio (HPSDR) are already in the works. Given the speed with which amateurs have been moving, it is probable that other companies and agencies have produced a similar product for several years. The current military SDR’s used in the field do not have adequate frequency coverage to effectively penetrate a low power mesh network. American war games need to take into account the possibility that we may not dominate the spectrum in a real word conflict.