A man in the audience said, “I entered a college in 1988, so I guess I’m of the same generation as you.” He was right. Director Bong was a college freshman in 1988.

He continued, “Park Hae-Il’s character is quite similar to my own experience in the college days. I was a student activist who struggle against the dictatorship and the United States. I think you have the same experience. Please tell us PROUDLY your movies represent it!” 

I was really upset at his remark. It is not only thought so by the former-antiAmerica-activist-US graduate student , but also by many of American movie critics. Shame on the obsolete ideologue, and the US movie critics unable (and refuse) to step over obsolete stereotypes in their understanding of the foreign countries.

Bong replied in two ways: 1) His movie deals with multi-fronts – the particular historical times (1980s in the Memories of Murder, the present in the Host), dictatorship as well as US. The issue of US is just a part of it; 2) In the Host, the main focus is on the failure of the system disregarding the social minorities. The answers were not new.

In addition, Bong told some anecdotes of the role models in his movies. Park Hae-il’s persona was borrowed from one of his college friends (JH Lee, I guess), who is now a manager at a luxurious department store in Seoul. When it comes to the finger man in the Host, he said many of his college friends complained it was too much sarcastic.   

I loved the anecdotes, because I have long been seeing the greatness of Bong in them. The reality of human life is evidently incoherent. Everything in life turns out be irreversibly messed up at a closer look.

In the two movies, the police department was messed up, the US army messed up, the local government messed up, and even the family messed up. We are destined to live with absurdity of the civilization(s) declared to be nice. Consistent with it, the provocative title of Bong’s first movie was “지리멸렬 (支離滅裂, Incoherence)”.

My unspoken question was about the families (headed by Song Kang-ho in both movies). Family was the only form of human group which could be recovered from the murder and monster.

Bong, was it so, because the family was something ideal for you, or the only exit from the disasters you could imagine?

In 80’s (in my teen years), I had to learn how to read “between the lines” of major newspapers to get a sense of what was going on in the politics of South Korea. Mass media was strictly under governmental control. K-CIA had an office within each and every major media company. While hardly going through government’s censorship, the reporters and editors circumvented the rule by means of pictures and arrangement of articles. I believed the Korean media was critical of the 30 year old military dictatorship, and the ruling class.

Since then, however, it has turned out to be that the Korean major journalism was quite ambivalent toward the Ancien Régime. The public sphere in 80’s was quite monolithic in the sense that the minority was extremely minor. Left-wing groups did not have any material basis. What they could claim for was just “moral” legitimacy. Neither could nor would they attempt to take a share of political power and resources from the ruling class. By occasionally supporting the left-wing discourse, the journalists could differentiate themselves from the ruling class, and get positioned for maximum profit especially in the era of rapid political change.

For a couple of reasons, the major newspapers gave up the eclecticism. First, alternative media (Hankyore in 90’s, Ohmynews 10 years later) came up. With more acute (left-wing) political stance, they were very successful in taking a chunk of news market in a very short period of time. Second, the left-wing governments took the office in two consecutive terms (1998 – 2007). The political power of the newspapers dramatically waned. They were even indicted for tax evasion, and some of the owners pleaded guilty.

The newspapers had a couple of options to deal with the new environment. First was to make clear their identity with proactive conservative agenda. But they opted out of it. It was partly due to the lack of clear agenda in Korean conservatism. The current Korean right-wing is quite ironic in that its slogans are characterized by dissension - Anti-North Korea, Anti-young generation (386ers), Anti-progressive intellectuals, and even Anti-real estate sale tax. It indicates they prioritize regaining political power to making clear the ideological stance. The newspapers are just following up this direction. By supporting the right-wing dissents, they are trying to restore the good old days, whereupon they would be able to occupy unique (and lucrative) position mildly differentiated from the hard-core right wing.

As of now, the newspapers enjoy the highest time of being a stronghold of Korean conservatism. Economic stagnation and the reckless Kim Jong-il have made the second reformist government the most unpopular regime ever in the era of post military dictatorship. The government has been stigmatized for the incompetence in leadership as well as for improperness of the ideology of its members (386ers who are former anti-dictatorship activists).

It is the best chance for the newspapers in long years. They are now taking the liberty to go to the extreme. Here is an example. The President is making a state visit to Cambodia right after APEC. At the meeting with Korean immigrants in Cambodia, he talked about the foreign aid of Korean government, saying: “Korea has a history of being colonized and civil war. But now, the Korean government helps about 47 countries with foreign aid. Korea is the only former-colony country doing foreign aid”.

One of the major newspapers, Joongang Daily, headlined the remark because the President called the Korean War as civil war. Without hesitation, the reporters (Sǔng-hŭi Park and Yŏng-jong Yi) likened it to North Korea and far-left scholars. In the article, they argue that, by using the term (civil war), the President turns out to be biased to the ideology of pro-North Korea and Anti-US.

The newspapers look like dreaming an unrealistic dream – restore the good old days by witchhunting and uprooting left-wings. The major newspapers are now going too far.

The network analysis used a symmetric matrix. I'd like to point out there are two kinds of symmetric matrix, and sometimes they make a big difference in network centralities.  

The first type of symmetric matrix is made by multiplying an incidence matrix (e.g. actor-membership matrix) by its transpose. Suppose the first author invites the other two for a 3-author paper. In this type of matrix, all of the three appear to have a relationship to one another, and their centralities are equal. It seems the case of the Wegman et al's report.

The second type of symmetric matrix is made by summing up a directional-asymmetric (adjacency) matrix and its transpose. In this type, the first author has a relationship with the other two, but the second and third authors are disconnected from each other. Accordingly, the most central is the first author.

To my experience, Bonacich centralities of the two types of matrix are generally correlated at the level of .8. But the second type is generally preferred because it holds much more information than the other.

Steven Poole's recent post on crookedtimeber is awesome. So are the comments following (I was knocked out by Alejandro's first one).

Framing God

Posted by Steven Poole

The Holy Trinity is getting a makeover:

When referring to the Trinity, most Christians are likely to say “Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.”
But leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are suggesting some additional designations: “Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child and Life-giving Womb,” or perhaps “Overflowing Font, Living Water, Flowing River.”
Then there’s “Rock, Cornerstone and Temple” and “Rainbow of Promise, Ark of Salvation and Dove of Peace.”
The phrases are among 12 suggested but not mandatory wordings essentially endorsed this month by delegates to the church’s policy-making body to describe a “triune God,” the Christian doctrine of God in three persons.
The Rev. Mark Brewer, senior pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church, is among those in the 2.3-million-member denomination unhappy with the additions.
“You might as well put in Huey, Dewey and Louie,” he said.

Some of the other proposed phrases include “Sun, Light and Burning Ray”, or even “Fire That Consumes, Sword That Divides and Storm That Melts Mountains.” This is a reaction to the supposedly “patriarchal” nature of the usual way to express the Trinity. I say, why not? I like the imagistic poetry of the alternatives. It reminds me of the names for movements in Chinese martial arts. How about “White Crane Spreads Its Wings, Green Dragon Emerges from the Water, and Step Back to Ride the Tiger”?

posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 4:29 am

comments

1. How about Rock, Paper, Scissors?

Posted by Alejandro · June 30th, 2006 at 4:51 am

....

John was right when he put aside Marx, whose portrait of industrial society was of fragmented capitalists vs. cohesive laborers.

A sociological perspective can be applied to the situation - the actors are looking at one another in the same class, as much as the counterpart over the class division.

John's observation of the blurred class division actually indicates the differentiation within each of the classes, which generally conditions the class conflict. 

Contending differentiation within a class can bring about outcomes against the interest of the class. A striking historical example was studied by Neil Smelser.

A greater part of factory workers in 19th century London was from rural area where a unit of workplace was family. Status differentiation in the farm had been of husbands over wives, or fathers over children. When the Factory Law was legislated, and child labor was banned, it outraged the father-workers as well as the factory owners. The former-peasant workers were not ready to get demoted by removing their subordinates in the workplace ?their own children.

"At the same time, there was widespread apprehension that a limitation of the hours of child labour would occasion the complete dismissal of children. Such a consequence not only would subtract from the family income, but also would break the traditional ties between adult and children. The fear of these consequences, moreover, was not simple propaganda from capitalists; the operative class itself was 'largely committed to the system of child labour and long hours'" (Smelser, 1959: 269).

Smelser, Neil J. 1959. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

This is an era of network.  In the world of academics, it covers American Journal of Sociology to Biological Bulletin.  Hit the Google News with “network”. As of now (Jun 9 2006), the biggest news all over the world is about whether death of the Al-Qaeda would hurt his own “network”. Likewise, political and cultural implication of network can never be exaggerated in this Global-Internet world.

hkimscil is one of those who are very much interested in network analysis. Months ago, he posted an interesting data on his blog, which was about the relationship among Woosuk Hwang and his coauthors for the scandalously discredited Science paper. I’m not sure about the reason he did not go further to analyze the data. Given the data structure, however, I suspect he might have experience some problems in doing so (no offense! ^^). The problem is very simple and easily encountered by people who begin to think of Network Analysis seriously (so did I ^^;). Statistical/mathematical analysis starts from correct understanding of data structure. In case of network analysis, one of the best references for network data is Breiger’s 1974 Social Forces paper - “The Duality of Persons and Groups”.

Fig 2. hkimscil’s data

 

Network analysis approaches data as matrix. Raw network data is usually an “incidence” matrix, where row represent actors, and columns the groups (or events) the actor belongs to. For example, a matrix with two columns (“NAME” and “2004”) can make a good incidence matrix. In the 32 by 1 matrix, value (1 or 0) indicates whether the actor belongs to the group of coauthors for 2004 paper.

 

However, this one column matrix does not produce any meaningful social networks among actors. The actors are just divided into two groups. Hence, we need more than two group information to produce a network matrix.

 

Another problem comes from columns such as “ORG1, 2” and “STATUS”. I can understand why the columns are placed there, but they do not compose a network matrix. To satisfy the formality of incidence matrix, I changed the data into following format.

 

Fig3. Incidence Matrix

 

For a further analysis, I limited the population to 2005 authors. The number of group variables are 21. With the information in the original data, I recoded “ORG 1, 2” into 7 categories. Likewise, 3 status groups and 10 area groups are constructed.

 

With incidence matrix, we can create an “adjacency” matrix, where both row and columns are of actors, and the elements are the number of co-membership in a group above. If Woosuck Hwang belong to every group Sunjong Kim joins, the element Hwang by Kim would be 21. Adjacency matrix is directly applied to many of network measures.

 

Imagine an i by j incidence matrix A. We can obtain two adjacency matrix from this with a simple matrix algebra:

 

            i by i adjacency matrix = AA^T, where A^T is the transpose of A

            j by j adjacency matrix = A^TA, where A^T is the transpose of A

 

In this case, AA^T would be about the relationship among actors, while A^TA would be about the relationship among the groups. The latter might not substantively make sense. But suppose we study the relationship among NGOs. The data of the memberships of the organizations can produce the network among them.

 

At this point, somebody would suspiciously ask me “That’s it?”. ^^ Don’t worry. It is “for dummies”. There is a very easy way waiting for you.

 

With the excel spreadsheet hanging on your desktop, go get UCINET 6which is generously available to public. It is a limited version, but working very good for this size of data.

 

For the purpose of “drawing networks”, we need to make an actor by actor adjacency matrix first. For this:

 

1. In Excel, block and copy all the data area including column headers such as NAME.
2. Go to UCINET, and Ctrl+S. Then you will see a UCINET spreadsheet, where first row and firs column are shaded in grey. Do not touch anything, and just Ctrl+V. Then you will see the excel data placed on the UCINET spreadsheet.
3. Ctrl+S with any name you want, and Alt+X (exit). The name of saved file would be “name.##h”. Keep in mind the file name and path.
4. In the menu, open “Data → Affiliations …” The you will see following dialogue box:

 

Click on

in the first line. And open the ##h file you saved. Then click on “OK”.
 

1. In the same directory you saved the data file, you will find “Affiliations.##h” file. It is the adjacency matrix formatted for UCINET.

 

Then you are perfectly ready for drawing a network.

 

1. Click on “Draw” on the menu bar, and you will see a big browser entitled “NetDraw”. Yes, it is the program for drawing networks.
2. By clicking on the open icon (not the one with A), open the “Affiliations,##h”, then you will see the network draw at the top.

It would be fun to find out the way change node colors, shape of overall network, etc. I would like to leave this pleasure to you guys!

 

- w