The Yin Blog

That Honda ad with the Asian couple

I don't normally watch commercials on TV, but this one caught my eye:

The kicker is that all the while the Asian couple is speaking in Mandarin about how to negotiate with the white car saleman, it turns out that the salesman also speaks Mandarin.

Ha ha ha! Well, it is a good reminder that there are non-Asians who can speak Mandarin. I have to admit, even knowing that fact, it's still a weird experience for me to see non-Asians speaking Mandarin. It shouldn't be; in a way, it's maybe the same for, say, whites in places with essentially no Asians to see me speak English. . . .

Potatoes make you gain weight?

I've known that french fries have a high glycemic index, meaning that they get converted into blood sugar quickly, leaving you feeling hungry sooner. Accordingly, it shouldn't be surprising that a new study finds that:

Eating more potato chips and French fries is likely to lead to a bigger weight gain over the years than the weight change associated with eating more of other foods, new research indicates.

The study, from the New England Journal of Medicine, stands out because it quantifies how much weight a person is likely to gain or lose over four years based on one additional daily serving of a range of specific foods. Eating more potatoes correlated with a gain of 1.28 pounds, with French fries in particular associated with a 3.35-pound gain.

Some other findings:

[S]ugary drinks, processed meat and red meat were associated with about a one-pound gain. Eating more fruits and vegetables, nuts, whole grains and yogurt correlated with slight weight loss over four years. Big jumps in physical activity were associated with smaller weight gains, and increased TV-viewing with bigger gains.

Hmm. I do like potatoes in just about any form -- chips, fries, mashed, hashed, or baked. I don't eat that much red meat, but I do love turkey sandwiches for lunch, so that's a fair amount of processed meat. And I'm sure that my TV watching is up there. . . . On the other hand, I do eat a fair amount of vegetables, fruit, whole grain, and yogurt.

And at my peak, I probably did end up with about a pound/year weight gain compared to the end of law school.

But over the past six months, I've run off all of that extra weight, and I'm back to what I weighed when I was in law school, with a body mass index of 21.5 or under. The big differences were a huge jump in physical exercise, and cutting out unnecessary snacking (with the help of a food journal). So I think I will continue to say, "Pass the potatoes, please."

Vegetable hate

This is a strange article claiming that it's just a myth that vegetables are good for you. The author finds vegetables pretty yucky:

Are they really so good for you that you need to endure the hardship of putting these foul plants in your mouth just to stay healthy? Do the alleged benefits of eating vegetables outweigh the terrible cost of having to eat them?

Very strange. I'm not a vegetarian (you'll have to pry my seafood from my dead, cold fingers), but I actually like a lot of vegetables:

- fresh salads (sometimes), especially Asian chicken salads

- artichokes (leaves and hearts)

- asparagus

- kale

- spinach (fresh or cooked)

- cauliflower (sauteed or steamed)

- broccoli (sauteed or steamed)

- corn

- green beans

- hearts of palm

- radishes (broiled)

- beets

Not to mention all kinds of things that I think technically aren't vegetables but probably get lumped in with them:

- avocadoes

- edamame

- potatoes

The best TV commercial ever?

These days, with TiVo, I don't watch commercials any more, but for some reason, I found myself thinking about this old Pamper ad full of baby animals. Notice how it closes with elephants and lions -- my favorites!

 

What is the most accurate time of day to weigh yourself?

Since the beginning of the year, I've lost about 15 pounds, mostly through consistent and extensive exercise (with increasing frequency and duration as I've gotten fitter). I haven't had too many burgers during that time, but I'm taking in 1800-2400 calories a day -- averaging about 2000 -- so it's not like I'm starving myself. As Angelina Jolie put it in the "making of" extra on the Salt DVD, if you exercise a lot, you can't help but lose weight.

Because I weigh myself at the same time of day, I know that the weight loss is real. On the other hand, my weight tends to fluctuate throughout the day by as much as 3-4 pounds. So it got me wondering, what is the most accurate time of day to weigh yourself?

Right after a workout (which is what I've been doing) is pretty much not the ideal time, because some of the weight loss is water-loss, which will get replenished. Is the beginning of the day, when getting up ideal? Or the end of the day, just before going to sleep?

UPDATE: Interesting -- your time running one mile may correlate to your risk of heart disease later on. Another benefit of exercise!

"How Asians get to see what it's like to be white" . . . .

One of my colleagues, who grew up in Hawaii, says that she hears something like this a lot from U.S-mainland-raised Asian-Americans upon visiting the island state.

I suppose you could also get a sense of that from visiting cities like Monterey Park, CA (60+% Asian), but yeah, with Hawaii, it's an entire state with a majority Asian population.

What happens when you don't check with the Dean of Students and use your own dumb ideas about "accommodating" students

This is a pretty incredible story:

As I mentioned, earlier in the week, I received an email from a student at UC Davis. I won't directly reproduce her email here, but the back story is that she is friends with a veterinary student at the university and, as a result, became privy to a communication sent fro the presidents of the 3rd year students to the rest of the class.  The note reads:

Dear Colleagues,

One of our classmates recently gave birth and will be out of class for an unknown period of time. This means she will undoubtedly miss one, or more, or all quizzes in VMD 444.  Dr. Feldman is not sure how to handle this and has requested the class give input and vote.  He has provided us with 6 options on which to vote and is open to any other ideas you may have.  Most likely a CERE poll will be up next week and a voting will close no later than Wednesday.  If you have other suggestions please email them to Dan or I ASAP. We will alert you to the opening of voting. Below are listed the options that Dr. Feldman has suggested. Please reserve comment on these options and provide us your opinion on them by voting when the time comes.  Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

a) automatic A final grade
b) automatic B final grade
c) automatic C final grade
d) graded the same as everyone else: best 6 quiz scores out of a possible 7 quiz scores (each quiz only given only once in class with no repeats)
e) just take a % of quiz scores (for example: your classmate takes 4 quizzes, averages 9/10 points = 90% = A)
f) give that student a single final exam at the end of the quarter (however this option is only available to this one student, all others are graded on the best 6 quiz scores and the % that results)

Please let us know if you have other thoughts on how to handle this situation and please keep your eye out for the upcoming vote.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Your Presidents

A full-scale denunciation of the "proposal" is set forth at the linked blog.  What's absurd isn't just having students vote on how to grade a classmate for being pregnant -- which might not even require any accommodation! -- but that the faculty member didn't do the obvious thing when confronted with a situation beyond his or her capacity for managing:

Go to the Dean of Students and ask him/her to see if any accommodation is needed and if so, to recommend said accommodation.

Over my past nine years of teaching, I've had three Deans of Students (two at Iowa, one at Lewis & Clark), and they have all been wonderful at interfacing with students who ask for accommodations. A good Dean of Students makes life on this front easy for faculty members by making recommendations in such situations. They obviously have far more experience than I would at determining what is or is not a reasonable accommodation.

To be sure, there's no indication from the email that the student in question actually did request an accommodation, which makes the situation even worse. But even if the faculty member were being proactive -- maybe imagining something like "what if she goes into labor during the final exam?" -- it would still make much more sense to check with the Dean of Students.

What if we mashed general elections with "Survivor"?

Some time ago, economist Steven Landsburg (I think) had a really neat idea that for congressional elections, we should each get two votes -- one for the local office, and one to cast in any other election for similar office. In other words, you'd get one vote to cast in your Senate race, and one to cast in any other contested Senate race for that election. And the same for the House race.

The point of this proposal was to subject porkbarrel masters like the late Sen. Robert Byrd (WV) to the wrath of the rest of the country if they steered too much to their own constituents at the expense of everyone else.

Think of the game theory implications of this proposal! Would the Republicans decide to concentrate all of their firepower on trying to oust, say, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA)? Or would they want to spread out their "extra" votes on the most vulnerable Democratic representatives? And would the Democrats retaliate by stacking all their votes against Rep. John Boehner (OH)? Or would they try to protect Pelosi? Given the colossal number of possibilities, I'm pretty sure there would be no Nash equilibrium.

But you know what would make this an even better proposal? (And by better, I mean, more entertaining. . . .) It should incorporate an element from CBS's "Survivor": the immunity idol.

Here's how it would work. After the primary elections are over, when each party's candidates have been determined, the two "tribes" (i.e., Ds and Rs) would "compete" in an immunity challenge of the type used in "Survivor." I would be quite partial to the "eat disgusting food" type, but it might also be entertaining to see congressional representatives slogging through mud while racing to throw balls at targets, or whatever else the producers come up with. The key would be that the list of potential challenges would be put on a giant wheel, and we'd spin the wheel right before the challenge, so as to prevent some kind of advance notice cheating.

Whichever "tribe" wins the immunity idol would then be able to use it to nullify all "extra" votes cast in that representative's district. In other words, for that race alone, only the votes cast by constituents would count. For maximum suspense value, the idol would have to be "played" before election polls close. . . .

Bilingualism and brains

NPR reports:

Research suggests that the growing numbers of bilingual speakers may have an advantage that goes beyond communication: It turns out that being bilingual is also good for your brain.

That's excellent news and motivation for my possibly Quixotic quest to learn on my own how to read/write Chinese.

The NPR article continues:

The idea that children exposed to two languages from birth become confused or that they fall behind monolingual children is a common misconception, says Janet Werker, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who studies language acquisition in bilingual babies.

I'm not a researcher in this area, but I think this sounds right -- except that I do recall one incident to the contrary, sort of. Back when he was in daycare, my older son liked to be picked up and held by the daycare teachers. And when he was on his own and then felt the need for some attention, he would walk over to a teacher, hold his arms up, and ask to be held.

Only, the way he asked was, "Bao bao me." Bao bao being Chinese for "hold" or "hug."

His teachers had no clue what he was trying to say, until we found out about this and explained to them what bao bao meant.

On learning Chinese

Although most academic subjects in school were fairly straightforward for me (until I got to Caltech, that is), foreign languages have been my Achilles' heel. If I were ever to get a PhD, it would've been in a field where I could have substituted mathematics for a language.

It didn't help that the school I attended from grades 6-10 kept changing the foreign language offering, so I know a smattering of Spanish (naturally, growing up in Southern California) and a tiny bit of German. Thanks to my parents, I can speak Chinese at a conversational level, but unfortunately, neither they nor I was very diligent about getting me to learn to read and write Chinese.

However, the combination of sending my son to a weekly Chinese class along with seeing the alarming amount of U.S. debt held by China has led me to think that I should probably devote some time to trying to amass a rudimentary level of literacy in Chinese. It's supposedly easier to learn foreign languages as a child, but on the other hand, being able to speak Chinese means that I don't have to grapple with learning vocabulary in quite the same way.

Of course, written Chinese is a character-based language, not an alphabet-based one. So you have to learn each word on its own, rather than an alphabet used to construct words.

There is something of a pattern to a number of words, though, since some characters are built from other characters -- boy, for example, is field plus strength (and strength resembles knife). Some animals, like dog and cat, share the same strokes on the left side of the character.

Anyway, apparently, if you can read 100 characters, you understand approximately 42% of what you might typically read. Reading 500 characters gets you up to 75% understanding.

So what I'm doing is going off this list of the ~3000 most common Chinese characters, starting at the top, and trying to learn one or two characters a day. I guess this will be a long-term project.