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Your citizen score

On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published the "Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System" that contained a rather radical and disturbing proposition: that the government could rank your trustworthiness based on your behavior and custom curate public good and commercial privileges based on your ranking.

2018-01-05 18:56

Taxonomy of K-pop

Kim Jong-hyun of K-pop boy band SHINee committed suicide a few days ago. While other Korean celebrities have committed suicide in the past _ most notably actress Choi Jin-sil in 2008 _ Kim's untimely death garnered domestic and international coverage.

2017-12-22 16:00

Is consciousness more than the brain?

The physical location of consciousness is an interesting problem that has been vexing neuroscientists, philosophers, and religious thinkers alike. A key question is whether consciousness is entirely a function of the brain, or is there more to consciousness than just the individual's biology? A logical corollary is whether an individual's consciousness belongs entirely to oneself or is it something that's shared somehow with one's surroundings? If shared, then what's the platform through which it's shared?

Do Je-hae | 2017-12-07 12:46

Where should my little boy go to school?

This was the question that consumed us as we got ready to make the momentous decision: which school should our little boy attend to start his official academic career? We didn't want to feel guilty by sending our child somewhere where we weren't confident he would receive the best opportunity to … what exactly?

2017-11-24 17:30

Facebook wants your naked pictures, really

According to Washington Post story by Travis M. Andrews dated Nov. 8, Facebook wants you to upload your own explicit photos - for your own good. This is how it works. You have explicit pictures that you are worried that your ex-lover might post to Facebook to embarrass you. This is your typical revenge porn scenario. To proactively prevent this, you upload your own explicit photos - those that you suspect your ex has and might post - to some type of a secure Facebook portal. Facebook won’t store the photos but will use some AI-driven algorithm to create a digital footprint of the photo so th...

2017-11-10 17:37

#Me, too. So what?

In 2014, close to 300 girls in the town of Chibok in Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram, an extremist Islamic terrorist organization based in northeastern Nigeria. A social media campaign, “#BringOurGirlsBack” went viral across the world, with global celebrities including then-first lady Michelle Obama personally chiming in to raise awareness of the horrific crime and to name and shame the Nigerian government to do something to rescue the girls. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Over the years, some girls came back home, but many are still unaccounted for.

2017-10-27 17:03

Nudging your karma

The central narrative of the 2008 financial crisis was that highly capable individuals driven by rational self-interest made such bad decisions that they almost brought down the world’s financial infrastructure and visited ruin upon themselves, not to mention the Main Street. But bad decision-making is not limited to powerful executives. From A-list celebrities to powerful politicians, we have witnessed people make disastrous, self-destructive decisions. For Exhibit A, look at what Harvey Weinstein has allegedly done in going from a legendary film producer to a sexual predator. I am sure tha...

2017-10-13 16:48

Swiping left on Asian men

Three years ago, Christian Rudder, a founder of OKCupid, a well-known online dating site, who also happens to be a Harvard-trained data scientist, analyzed the interactions on his site and came up with interesting generalizations about how people behave in dating situations. TIME Magazine summarizes Rudder's findings as such: ''According to Rudder's research, Asian men are the least desirable racial group to women… On OkCupid, users can rate each other on a 1 to 5 scale. While Asian women are more likely to give Asian men higher ratings, women of other races -black, Latina, white -give Asian...

2017-09-29 16:24

Can NK be just another country?

I’ve always found B.R. Myers a very interesting voice in Korea studies. His idea that North Korea is not a Marxist-Leninist or a Stalinist state but an ethnonational-socialist country patterned more after Imperial Japan than Soviet Union really struck a nerve when I first read it. It was jarring but also very insightful. It was certainly a shock to my subconscious sense of ethno-nationalism that admittedly informed my analytical paradigm and hermeneutics when it came to Korea.

2017-09-01 17:08

Google's sins of omission

“Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” was the title of the 10-page memo that James Damore circulated with his fellow Google employees. In the memo, Damore took issue over what he perceived was Google’s current Politically Correct (PC) culture, claiming that the gender gap in Google’s diversity was not due to discrimination but inherent differences in what men and women find interesting. Damore was promptly fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes. Most of the outrage against this memo had to do with Damore’s claim that there are biological differences between men and women that lead to natura...

2017-08-18 17:18

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