Today is Go Skateboarding Day, and we would be remiss if we didn’t give some kind of acknowledgment. This is a photo series called Life of a Skateboard (滑板的生活), which offers a glimpse into a day as one of the city’s skaters.
I took this series of “portraits” of my own board in Shanghai. In Pudong on the east side of the Huangpu River, I was using this board to get where I needed to go every day. Eventually it grew from a simple mode of transportation into a lens through which to view and interact with the city. Pudong is more residential than the bustling west side of the river (Puxi), and skating through the area I got to know a recurring cast of characters. This photo series cuts me out of the equation, offering the viewer that same experience I had, alone in Pudong on this Chinese skateboard, +C vitamin soda in hand, getting to know some of those characters.
Originally shown in an exhibition on Century Avenue, these photos are now made available here to celebrate Go Skateboarding Day, and the country’s growing skate community.
In spite of rigid opposition from the state government, understanding of LGBT identities is largely on the upswing in China. There are obviously huge strides still to be made, but the overall presence of gay culture in mainstream society is leagues ahead of where it was 20 years ago (in the 90s, you would likely be told that there were no gay people in China). The official stance against same-sex partnerships has not changed since homosexuality was removed from the country’s list of mental illnesses in 2001, and it was only in 1997 that it was decriminalized. But changing cultural currents in the mainland have brought LGBT groups into a more modern and accepted place in the past ten years, and the country’s major cities now have a wealth of gay community venues, dating apps, and events like Shanghai Pride.
Shanghai Pride started in 2009, and was reputedly the first mass LGBT event to take place in mainland China. It’s since grown into a huge annual celebration, now in its ninth consecutive year. But attendees this year were left scratching their heads at one of the events key sponsors – the US State Department and its Shanghai consulate.
After all, the LGBT community overwhelmingly voted against Donald Trump in November’s presidential election (only 13 percent backed Trump, according to the Pew Research Center), and recent LGBT marches across the US have been tinged with anger at the current administration. A key LGBT leader in the US recently said the community is “at war” with Trump.
In Shanghai, event attendee @wtf_Life questioned the State Department’s sponsorship:
Later he told us: “Under Hillary Clinton, the state department had a mission to promote LGBT rights around the world, so that trickles down to consulates and embassies, including in China. That was during the Obama administration. So now we have the Trump administration, and they’ve struggled to fill these diplomatic posts. So I think you have a lot of Obama holdovers and nonpartisan diplomats who are sympathetic with gay rights, even though now they’re working under Trump.”
One thing all attendees seem to agree on is that Donald Trump in all likelihood had no knowledge or part in this. @wtf_Life points out that one of Trump’s big talking points is that the US is spending too much money overseas.
“I’m not sure if the state department’s policy to promote gay rights around the world has changed. It might not have changed. It just seems weird to me.”
Trump’s decision to keep Obama’s top gay rights envoy at the state department earlier this year came as a surprise, and might offer some explanation as to the department’s continued support for LGBT communities worldwide. In any case, it looks like the United States’ international reputation is at least in somewhat decent hands, if the consulates themselves have anything to say about it.
Doctor Liu Ruopeng has been called the Elon Musk of China. His company is involved in several projects that sound like they are straight from science fiction – balloons that fly to space, jetpacks, flying cars, and metamaterials.
Metamaterials were what made Dr. Liu famous. As a doctorate student at Duke University, he became known for his work on the “invisibility cloak,” a type of material that manipulates light and makes the wearer seem invisible.
His company Kuang-Chi Science Limited (光启) made its first strides in 2010 with only five employees. Today, Kuang-Chi, and its so-called Global Community of Innovation, has more than 2,600 employees in 18 countries and regions. They have opened an Innovation Center in Tel Aviv, Israel and launched the ASEAN Innovation Headquarters in Singapore.
Kuang-Chi is also known for launching a turtle into near space with their low-cost Traveler aircraft attached to a balloon made out of metamaterial that could one day enable humans to enjoy spectacular views of Earth. The company has announced a space-travel theme park and has been testing its aircraft in the deserts of Xinjiang, China.
“Our goal is to reach that point in five years and this is our second year,” said Dr. Liu during a panel on disruptive technology at TechCrunch Shenzhen. “We want to keep the price low, the first goal is below $100,000, and the second one is below $50,000. ”
Few competitors
For the comparison with Elon Musk, Dr. Liu notes that there are very few companies that engage in aviation and space rocket research and development, so they do not face much competition.
“Very few companies are working on airplanes, jetpacks, rockets, space, and metamaterials. It’s way easier compared with 10 years ago if you want to build a rocket, or an airplane or anything like this,” he said. “I think it will be a new trend for people to go to this heavy industry”.
Critics have been quick to point out that his explorations in near-space flight and metamaterials, as well as the purchase of Martin Jetpack, have been expensive projects funded with the help of the Chinese government and have yet to yield a commercially viable product. The pilot of the jetpack, P14, is due to come out this year, and could have many applications, including rescue missions, said Dr. Liu.
“If you think about technology, new types of aircraft and the engineering and production work it is extremely difficult and it is long-term and expensive. But on the other hand, I think this is something that people want,” he said. “You need some companies to insist on developing this very useful and breakthrough technology for all these potential customers. The second thing is that, if you only focus on the jetpack, you will see a lot of challenges in the short-term, but we are actually using similar technology to build some other useful vehicles.”
Safe cities
Kuang-Chi’s newest project is bringing smart city technology to China with the help of the innovation center in Israel. The concept is aimed at increasing security, fire safety, and environmental protection.
“You can put put thousands of policemen on the street or even military but you won’t feel very comfortable,” said Dr. Liu in an interview with TechNode after his fireside chat. “Even though there are a lot of cameras right now, this doesn’t make the city safe. We need intelligent systems, algorithms and AI to really create an automatic protection system.”
To protect city dwellers, Kuang-Chi aims to employ drones, robots, and flying machines aided by AI systems. One solution is Kuang-Chi’s Cloud – a tethered aerostat that could become the city’s own satellite. The zeppelin-like aircraft can monitor a very large area and function as a command center, Dr. Liu explained.
And if you didn’t think this was Orwellian enough, Kuang-Chi is also investing in other cutting-edge technologies that can be used to increase security. They include AgentVi, a video analytics system for real-time event detection, and drone surveillance company SkyX.
Fueling innovation
But it would be wrong to state that Kuang-Chi’s only interest is security. The company has established the Kuang-Chi Global Community of Innovation (GCI) fund in May 2016, worth $300 million, and has so far invested $50 million in various startups. During the second round of investments, the GCI fund aims to spend $250 million, and their first investment in the new cycle has been in Gilo, a UK-based propulsion engine company that has pioneered flying cars. Before that, Kuang-Chi has also backed biometric authentication provider Zwipe, emotion analysis software Beyond Verbal, and a low-cost aircraft company called Solarship.
Dr. Liu said that his company wants to invest in technology that can make machines smarter.
“Smart machines are our partner, rather than our tool, and we want to create synergy between machines and humans beings.”
Let’s answer your questions first about this video that People’s Daily just uploaded to its YouTube page, titled “Chinese PLA female soldiers show off their swag dance moves”:
1. No, I don’t know what’s going on here.
2. I said no.
3. PLA stands for People’s Liberation Army.
4. No!
5. That would be Welsh singer/songwriter Samuel Evanson — Ice Cold.
6. Actually, I really don’t know if that’s an appropriate use of the word “swag.” Let’s see what Urban Dictionary has to say…
You’ve probably seen a Jennifer Bin photograph before without even realizing it. Her shots come at you from impossible angles, offering up worlds more revealing than they have a right to be. To look at a Jennifer Bin photograph is to be in one, occupying the artist’s space — floating in the creator’s ether — dangling above multiple layers of light and air, as able to fall as fly.
Or maybe it’s not so much that you’ve seen her photos before, as you’ll maybe never see anything like them again. They’re instantly memorable:
Her signature series features shots from rooftops and generally high places, in which she dangles her legs over the ledge and dares you to look with her at what’s below.
Vertigo sufferers, avert your eyes:
Bin is a Chinese Canadian (she was born in Toronto) who currently lives in Shanghai. She was recently featured in The Bund Magazine, which highlighted her series of “magical” Shanghai photographs that took her two years to create. “Through her lenses, Shanghai is changed into a city out of science fiction,” Bund Magazine wrote.
Or as Vogue Taiwan put it: “Bin Xin [her Chinese name] lets everyone see a different Shanghai: besides hair-raising, also beautiful as to make one gasp.”
Here’s a photo called King of Shanghai:
Born in Toronto, Bin currently lives in Shanghai, where she is a UI/UX designer. Earlier this year her work was featured in an Apple ad campaign.
She has an Instagram page with 93,600 followers, but more of her work is on the photography platform 500px, where she has 181,000 followers. Her photos have been viewed 13 million times over there. She was profiled on that site last year, where she said:
One of the biggest challenges I had to overcome is finding my own aesthetic. I think it’s very easy to give in to photography trends, particularly in rooftop photography where you see a lot of feet dangling shots. It’s tempting to take these types of photos because these photos tend to do very well on social media, and I’ve caved probably one too many times myself. However, since so many people hit the same spots and get the same vantages, I think it’s way more fun to try to get something different. In my photos, I try to look for strong geometry and patterns. I really play up the architectural nature of these rooftops.
Go check out her website and follow her on her various platforms. We have a feeling you’ll want to see her future work.
The latest issue of TheEconomisthas a long profile of the elephant that makes a convincing case of the species as a mirror for human society. Not much of it is new reporting, but it’s gripping stuff nonetheless. Some highlights:
…human beings aside, no species on Earth has a more complex society than that of elephants. And elephant society does indeed have parallels with the way humans lived before the invention of agriculture.
Elephants have large hippocampuses — 40 percent bigger than humans — which means they really do have good memories, which they need in order to function in group settings:
…a clan will usually have at least 100 adult members, and may have twice that, this means an adult (an adult female, at least) can recognise and have meaningful social relations with that many other individuals.
A figure of between 100 and 200 acquaintances is similar to the number of people with whom a human being can maintain a meaningful social relationship—a value known as Dunbar’s number, after Robin Dunbar, the psychologist who proposed it. Dunbar’s number for people is about 150.
They are among a very small number of species capable of abstract thinking:
…experiments conducted on domesticated Asian elephants (easier to deal with than African ones) show that they can use novel objects as tools to obtain out-of-reach food without trial and error beforehand.
Elephants have a very particular — one might say human — reaction to the dead:
Elephant corpses are centres of attraction for living elephants. They will visit them repeatedly, sniffing them with their trunks and rumbling as they do so.
The connection to China, while pushed to the very end of the article, is nonetheless crucial.
By the end of this year, all ivory sales will be banned in this country, a development that just might save the elephant from its biggest enemy: human poachers.
From The Economist:
Already, the price of the stuff in China has come down by two-thirds, from a peak of $2,100 a kilogram in 2014 to $730 earlier this year. That is bad news for smugglers, and for the poachers who supply them. If the Chinese ban really does stick, rather than driving the trade underground, then it is just possible that historians of the future will record 2017 as having been the year of the elephant.
Last week China shut down 67 ivory facilities, which includes 12 of 35 ivory carving facilities and 55 of 130 ivory shops, with plans to shut down all of these facilities by 2018. Besides the closure of its ivory market, the report suggests China’s crackdown on illegal ivory and economic slowdown, as well as a general increase in awareness about elephant poaching and ivory, have helped drive the price of ivory down. That mix of events, while a detriment to the livelihoods of those in the ivory business, is precisely what needs to happen in order to help stop poaching, elephant advocates say.
…
“China must be encouraged for doing the right thing,” says Resson Kantai Duff of Save the Elephants. “There is still a long way to go to end the excessive killing of elephants for ivory, but there is now greater hope for the species. China has shown great leadership, and deserves commendation.”
These are good developments. Listen to Yao Ming, people: “When the buying stops, the killing can too.”
