SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Sulla
On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what's wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He's a historian of modern China and we're perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.
Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you're a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is "archaic." Long live the alphabet.
But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China's enormous catalog of characters into an advantage.
His argument is [...] about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, "is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard." You press the "a" key and "a" appears on your screen. "It doesn't make use of a computer's processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof." Type "a" on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.
[...] The Chinese way of inputting text—the software-mediated way—will win out, says Mullaney. Actually, it's already won out. Our mobile phones now have predictive text and autocomplete. It took the constraint of mobile to get Westerners to realize the limits of the simple what-you-type-is-what-you-get keyboard. But even then, you could only get Americans to go so far.
Read more at The Atlantic.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:31PM
I would like to nuance some of these things. Not that I think what you wrote is not true mind you. Just because I think that it depends on how we look at it. I'm not sure any of this is really related to the OP.
China is on the fastest course to having major issues of a scale that is incomparable than what we see in the western world. I'll just take healthcare. Traditionally the Chinese have had a balanced diet made of healthy foods. Now, between the pollution, the proliferation of junk food (both Western and Eastern), we see that this population is going to get worse problems with diabetes and other chronic illnesses much faster than their western counterparts. There is a reason why rich Chinese leave China. It's an incredibly busy place where urban landscapes change radically in weeks/months. But the long term costs are going to be, and are already, huge. Any Chinese I know who lives there tells me it takes them 45 minutes to make a meal because 30 minutes are spent just washing the food.
The Chinese government also likes to go fast. It works well in some cases, but in many others, it leaves unsustainable infrastructure that is not maintained and cannot be fixed. Just look at the nice tall high rises they build. Maybe the structure is sound, but the finishings are often of very poor quality. It's done fast and not well, it won't last. That does not mean that the western countries know how to do it better. It's just that when the government says go, you go even if you think it's a stupid idea. Because otherwise bad things happen to you. The Transit Elevated Bus is a recent example of that but there are many others. Again, not that don't have that problem in the West.
As for STEM graduates, there is an incredible number indeed. But these are highly specialized, number-crunching people who are very good at the one thing they were trained for. Critical thinking, autonomy etc. not so much. I generalize of course but it's a trend I have observed and discussed with colleagues over the past few years.
20 years ago, I would have absolutely loved to visit and possibly live in China. Now, not happening.