Greedy little China

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You could not make this stuff up. According to today’s New York Times, Dubya is planning to lecture the Chinese president on the need to curb his (i.e. China’s) thirst for oil! Yes, that’s right — the US is going to hector the Chinese for guzzling too much oil.

WASHINGTON, April 18 — The competition for access to oil is emerging high on the agenda for President Hu Jintao’s visit to the White House this week. President Bush has called China’s growing demand for oil one reason for rising prices, and has warned Beijing against trying to “lock up” global supplies.

With crude oil selling for more than $70 a barrel and American motorists paying $3 a gallon for gasoline, American officials say the subject cannot be avoided at Thursday’s meeting in the Oval Office, as it was sidestepped when Mr. Bush visited Beijing last fall.

China’s appetite for oil also affects its stance on Iran, where a growing confrontation with the United States over nuclear programs has already unsettled oil markets. China has invested heavily in Iran, and as a permanent member of the Security Council, its position on the question of sanctions is crucial.

Even as Mr. Hu arrived in Seattle on Tuesday, Chinese and American negotiators were debating a proposal for the two presidents to announce a joint study of both nations’ energy needs as a way to ward off conflict in coming decades, when China’s rapidly expanding need for imported energy to sustain its growth may collide with the needs of the United States, Europe and Japan.

In 2004 China used some 6.5 million barrels of oil a day and overtook Japan as the world’s second largest user of petroleum products. The largest, the United States, consumes about 20 million barrels a day…

I’m not known for my admiration of the repressive Chinese regime, but in this case I trust that Hu tells George where to stuff his demands.

A different London

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Serendipity. I stumbled on this lovely essay by Ian Jack while looking for something else. Sample:

Perhaps the best Sunday morning of my life happened in June 1970, when I walked across Hampstead Heath from an interview with Harold Evans, which closed with his saying that I’d got a job on his newspaper. It was sunny, warm enough for the Sunday Times editor to wear nothing more than a dressing gown (he’d told me to be early, but he was in bed when I got there) as he conducted the conversation over his breakfast orange juice at a table in his back garden.

His house was a Tudorbethan villa on the Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate. I remember he said, in the context of where I could afford to live, that a house like his would cost about £20,000, but that flats could be had for £5,000 or £6,000. My salary as a sub-editor would be £3,000. All these amounts seemed large.

I walked across the Heath to the tube at Hampstead in a daze of excitement. The sun sparkled on the ponds, couples walked dogs or kissed each other on the grass, the dome of St Paul’s shivered far away in the haze, a kite bobbed up on the horizon….

F’s the letter when it comes to reading web pages

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From Jakob Neilsen’s Alertbox) newsletter…

F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.

In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.

Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.

Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

Obviously, users’ scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they’ll only read across once, making the pattern look like a rotated L (with the crossbar at the top). Generally, however, reading patterns roughly resemble an F, though the distance between the top and lower bar varies…

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The road just taken

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On the way from Kenmare, last Monday. It was one of those magical days when the rain-rinsed Irish air is so clear that you have the feeling that a layer has been peeled off your eyes.

The Chinese attitude to IP

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This morning’s Observer column…

The one phrase you hear very little of whenever China’s economic potential is discussed is ‘intellectual property’. This is because China is world champion in every branch of piracy known to man. I don’t think there’s a CD, DVD, computer game or software package that is not illicitly available for a dollar or two in virtually every town in China.

That’s why the top executives of Western technology companies are – to a man or woman – agreed upon one thing: that while they are more than happy to have their products manufactured by Chinese labour in Chinese factories, they will never, ever entrust their intellectual property to any Chinese organisation…

Quote of the day

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For the poor, globalization is not an accomplished fact but a condition that remains to be achieved. The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.

John Gray, writing about “The Global Delusion” in The New York Review of Books.

StopBadware.org

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An interesting new initiative by the Berkman Centre, Oxford’s Internet Institute and Lenovo. In an interview with MIT Tech Review, Johathan Zittrain described the motivation for the initiative thus:

Machines clogged with “malware” — the catchall term for code that infiltrates PCs to steal data, send out spam, or produce pop-up messages — are already costing billions annually and testing everyone’s tolerance.

And a single destructive virus could prompt harsh regulations and cause millions of people to seek safe, closed networks.

To help fight back, Zittrain and fellow academics have just launched a new antimalware effort (www.stopbadware.org) funded by Google, Sun Microsystems, and Lenovo (the Chinese firm that acquired IBM’s PC division).