When you first arrive, read and think widely and exhaustively for a year. Assume that everything you read is bullshit until the author manages to convince you that it isn’t. If you do not understand something, don’t feel bad - it’s not your fault, it’s the author’s. He didn’t write clearly enough.
If some authority figure tells you that you aren’t accomplishing anything because you aren’t taking courses and you aren’t gathering data, tell him what you’re up to. If he persists, tell him to bug off, because you know what you’re doing, dammit.
This is a hard stage to get through because you will feel guilty about not getting going on your own research. You will continually be asking yourself, “What am I doing here?” Be patient. This stage is critical to your personal development and to maintaining the flow of new ideas into science. Here you decide what constitutes an important problem. You must arrive at this decision independently for two reasons. First, if someone hands you a problem, you won’t feel that it is yours, you won’t have that possessiveness that makes you want to work on it, defend it, fight for it, and make it come out beautifully. Secondly, your PhD work will shape your future. It is your choice of a field in which to carry out a life’s work. It is also important to the dynamic of science that your entry be well thought out. This is one point where you can start a whole new area of research. Remember, what sense does it make to start gathering data if you don’t know - and I mean really know - why you’re doing it?
Denizen is an online magazine dedicated to Third Culture Kids, also known as TCKs.
What is this about?
Third Culture Kids are the citizens of the future. We possess the globalized views and diverse experiences that are necessary in a ever-shrinking world. We will be the leaders of tomorrow, and will help others navigate this globalized society.
Unfortunately, we also struggle with identity, relationships, visas and careers in our unique TCK way. Denizen’s journalists and artists will help us muddle through these challenges by fostering a virtual TCK community.
TCKs are rarely citizens of the places they live. Instead, they are denizens, people who are “admitted rights to residence,” people who become inhabitants after “regularly frequenting a place.” We’re hoping that Denizen will become your online home, one that you’ll regularly frequent to share your unique TCK experience with others who simply “get it.”
Fellow classmate, Joshua Lim was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore. After junior college, he spent over two years in the Singaporean army and then left for the University of Southern California to study filmmaking. The Olive Depression is his first feature-length film after graduation.
Ernst Bettler is a fictional Swiss graphic designer. He was invented by Christopher Wilson in a 2000 hoax article published in the second issue of Dot Dot Dot, a magazine of visual culture.
According to the article, Bettler was asked in the 1950s to design advertisement posters for Pfäfferli+Huber (P+H), a Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer. The article states that Bettler knew of the company’s involvement in Naziconcentration camp experiments and decided to accept the commission with the intention of damaging P+H. The four posters he created, Wilson’s article recounts, were exemplary works of International Typographic Style design, advertising P+H drugs such as “Contrazipan”. However, according to the article, the posters featured abstract compositions that could be read as capital letters – spelling out “N - A - Z - I” when displayed in sequence. Wilson’s article states that the public outcry that followed the public display of the posters ruined P+H in a matter of weeks.
Even though it was highly detailed and featured many photographs and illustrations, the article was a complete fabrication. Ernst Bettler, Pfäfferli+Huber and its drugs do not exist, and neither do the Swiss towns “Sumisdorf” and “Burgwald” that feature in the article – their names are presumably based on the real Swiss towns of Sumiswald and Burgdorf. Nonetheless, the story was well received in graphic design circles. Among others, the September/October 2001 “Graphic Anarchy” issue of Adbusters magazine hailed Bettler’s work as “one of the greatest design interventions on record”, and the 2002 graphic design textbook “Problem Solved” by Michael Johnson covers Bettler as one of the “founding fathers of the ‘culture-jamming‘ form of protest”.
The Welcome to Beijing olympic video is really interesting. Not something unique to Chinese, but it is a really common technique to have to have celebrities share a song or phrases together like this. I saw it all the time in HK. Regardless of this technique, it still captivated me because there were so many celebrities, and like nelson said, not all are in the mainland. But I think what makes it powerful is because I doubt they did pay all the celebrities wads of cash like they would receive for a regular advertisement. I do feel there is a sense of patriotism, that each person, regardless of how busy, rich and famous are believe this is a good thing that they stand behind. And as a collective, it is quite moving.
Which reminded me of the ONE campaign. A similarly powerful campaign utilizing celebrities to take a stand and urge the public to do the same. I’m sure you guys are familiar with this video, but check it out again and experience the impact of this emotional attachment.
So it is as powerful without high production and familiar faces.
Philippe Starck apparently apologizes for the waste his design career has caused.
Reportedly he says:
“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact.Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years’ time. I want to do something else, but I don’t know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression…. In future there will be no more designers. The designers of the future will be the personal coach, the gym trainer, the diet consultant.”
“Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris’ work celebrates the world’s diversity even as it illustrates the universal concerns of its occupants. His computer programs scour the Internet for unfiltered content, which his beautiful interfaces then organize to create coherence from the chaos.
His projects are both intensely personal (the “We Feel Fine” project, made with Sep Kanvar, which scans the world’s blogs to collect snapshots of the writers’ feelings) and entirely global (the new “Universe,” which turns current events into constellations of words). But their effect is the same — to show off a world that resonates with shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs and troubles.”
“Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing…Interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.”
