Free Editing and Writing Opportunity

Hello, dear IDAS and IMAS friends!

I, in partnership with the International Association, am building a virtual space to offer opportunities for any writer or English language learner interested in engaging the cultural scene of Taipei.  Are you interested, or know anyone who might be?

The purpose of this website is two-fold:

1.) Offer readers great writing and insight about culture in Taipei, Taiwan (think music scene, art galleries, local writers, etc.).
2.) Offer local English language learners the opportunity to improve their writing skills and see their work published online.

Here’s how it works:

For each 200-500 word article you write regarding a cultural venue or activity, local musical group, museum, etc., qualified English writing instructors will edit with an analysis of your common mistakes and stylistic suggestions.

If you write 3 articles, our editors will also analyze any paper or letter of yours under 10 pages double-spaced, free of charge.

If enough people participate, a quarterly prize of (at least) 2,000 NTD will be awarded to the author with the best writing of that period. See this page for a writing sample and suggestions for how to compose a winning article.

Please help taipeiexpat.info inform more people of the cultural opportunities that await them in Taipei, and improve your English as well. Forward to friends or anyone you think might be interested, and Happy Writing!

For questions and submissions, email: samantha.sprole (at) gmail (dot) com

Call for Papers — 2012 PNC Annual Conference

Here’s another conference, also on December 7-9, 2012. This one is at UC Berkeley in California.

The submission deadline is July 31, 2012

The 2012 PNC Annual Conference and Joint meetings is being hosted by ECAI (Electronic Cultural Atlas
Initiative) and the School of Information at UC Berkeley with the collaboration of the UC Berkeley East Asian Library.

The conference theme is “New Horizons: Information Technology connecting Culture, Community, Time, and Place”.

The proposed streams include:
Collaboration – Building a Collaborative Research Universe – collaboration tools and knowledge integration
Community – Digital humanities and social sciences in the interest of society
Virtual Cultural Information Management – Visualization, Analysis, and Interaction – 3D data, multimedia, and virtual museums
Digital Text – New horizons in text integration, analysis, and visualization
Cultural Atlases – Integration, Visualization and Complexity –   regions, themes, and change over time
Open Knowledge – Sharing Cultural Heritage – Semantic Web, Linked Open Data, and related technologies

Further information on the program and proposed panels can be found on the ECAI website at: http://ecai.org/activities/PNC2012/

(Although that website doesn’t work on my computer — let me know if you have any luck accessing it)

Call for Papers — India/Japan Relations

The Centre for Southeast Asian & Pacific Studies, Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, India  is organizing an international conference on “India-Japan Relations: Transforming into Potential Partnership.”

The Conference is scheduled for 7-9 December, 2012.

I’m afraid that’s all the information I have on this so far … none of the links on the main page work, but if you go to the “Contact Us” page and click the links from there, then you should be able to access them.

 

UPDATE — I have heard back from the organizer, and he is amenable to us putting together an IDAS panel at the conference.

So: who wants to travel together, as a group, to India?

Please let me knw ASAP so we can contact Dr. Reddy and see about arranging the panel. (This promises to be a lot of fun–a bunch of us did something similar in Pusan, South Korea, and it was a blast!)

 

WordPress sucks…

… but it’s free.

I’ve spent the last few days (well, among other endeavors) trying to figure out the process for “Accepting an Invitation” to be an Editor on this blog. I had hoped to write a helpful tutorial. Instead, I’ve just gone a little more gray.

I have sent out the promised invitations to all of you, and had hoped to see more of them accepted. To those of you who managed to accept the invitations: congratulations, you are now members of Mensa. Under my own confluence of cookies, caches and other conditions, it seems impossible. I can only assume that my ISP is forever tarnished with a virtual scarlett letter signalling WordPress not to accept me, under the physics principle that two user accounts cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

To everyone else, I apologize profusely for the labryinthine process of joining this blog: I blame the ironically named “Happiness Engineers” for their sick sense of humour.

Fortunately, I have found this third-party tutorial on how to go about it:

Creating an Account in WordPress

Once you are logged in as an Editor, it should be straightforward to post anytime. If this doesn’t work, please leave a comment on this thread to let me know, and I’ll work harder to solve this little tech problem.

As always, if anyone has expertise in this area, and could help us all navigate these issues, I would love to hear from you.

Academic proofreading

I’d like to try a little experiment in crowdsourcing here:

Dr. Blundell’s new book is going to the printer next week, and he is up against a strict deadline to get the galleys proofread.

If you are free and willing to help out, he could sure use your help: the more eyes, the shorter the job.

Plus, it will give you a bit of an insight into publishing, especially academic publishing, and the process involved. Soon enough, each of us’ll be working on journal articles or book chapters of our own, I’ll wager!

And as an added bonus, the book is all about Taiwan since the lifting of martial law in 1987, and the chapters are really interesting!

Here’s from Dr. Blundell:

“From early afternoon on Saturday 12th May, I am having a roundtable of
final proof reading of the Taiwan book laser prints.

Please notify those possibly interested to partake in this historic event.
To be in the Impressive Business Lounge Third Floor passing book page
bundles around.

Howard Civil Service International House
http://intl-house.howard-hotels.com/CT_AsiaPacific2.php?Psn=5539

Exit from Exit 2 Taipei MRT Taipower Building Station, turn left and walk
along Xinhai Road for 10 min, left at the junction of Xingsheng S. Road.

Phone: 7712-2323″

 

Takeover

If you are free this Saturday, 12 May, you may enjoy a few acts from the UK and Taiwan who promise to tear it up with epic beats.

DJs Zo, Dubstep, Hulo, Graham Forrest and ornine, and my old buddy DJ Radio Ra, will be performing at Pipe Livehouse from about 10:30pm until around 04:00.

The address is # 1 SiYuan St., Zhongzheng District,

It’s NT$300 at the door, with a drink.

Falun Gong lecture

Dr. Ryan Adams of UC Santa Barbara is in Taiwan doing field research on the Falun Gong, and we are lucky enough to have him agree to be a guest speaker in Dr. Blundell’s Tuesday night class on culture.

Dr. Adams will be speaking about the Falong Gong, as well as on the process of doing field research.

Angel has booked us a bigger classroom for this event: it’s on the 2nd floor of the North Wing, room number 270206.

The class runs from 7-10pm this coming Tuesday, 15 May.

 

Here’s the official press release:

“Date: Tuesday 15th May 2012

Venue: Social Science Building, 2nd floor, North Wing, 270206

Time: 7:10-10:00

Dr Ryan Adams will present, with discussion –

Falun Gong: ‘Religion’ and ‘Chinese Civilization’

This lecture will introduce the main aspects of the Falun Dafa phenomenon, outlining their practices both physical, textual, and ethical, asking if Dafa constitutes a ‘religion’, or whether it is merely ‘religious’ and discussing the ways that Dafa re-visions elements of Buddhism, Daoism and ‘qigong’ – weaving new fabric out of old cloth to consider the movement’s claims to be the ‘standard-bearer of Chinese civilization’.”

I am definitely going, and I urge you to come as well—it promises to be extremely interesting, and important for those of us heading into our own research phase.

NCCU’s birthday march

On May 17th NCCU will celebrate its birthday. I’m hoping this means a Guinness-world-record sized cake!

This year, IMAS and IDAS students will join the College of Social Science to walk around the track together. If you haven’t done this yet, it is truly something to behold: many of the departments really go all-out with colourful costumes and banners as they march past the dais.

Angel tells me that Dean Chuang has invited the students from IDAS, IMAS, and other programs to perform some cheerleading stuff.  Had I known in advance, I would have been practising my old moves (you should have seen me do a Leapin’ Lora/Scorpion followed by a Teddy Sit back in the day), but I don’t think we have anyone to cover Back Base or Front Spot, so I might just content myself with the march past. How much you want to dance, I leave up to you.

The plan is to meet up in the office in the 12th floor at around 8:45, and then go downstairs to join the rest of the CSS gang.

Meet and greet with the dean

…no, the OTHER dean!

The College of Social Sciences has issued an invitation to all the foreign students in the CSS to on Thursday May 31st, 2012 to meet with the Dean of College of Social Sciences, Prof. Yih-Chyi Chuang.

The dean hopes to create more communication and provide further assistance to CSS international students, and to get a feel for what we are thinking.

This is a great opportunity to express your opinions about CSS and NCCU directly to the head honcho.

Also, you will get to meet with other foreign students from different departments within CSS.

Here are the details：

【Date】Thursday, May 31st

【Time】12：10～13：30

【Venue】The 1st Conference Room, 13th Fl., South Wing of General Building (yes, that’s the Awesome Room^TM)

I urge all IMAS and IDAS students to attend — it was very useful last year, and the refreshments were top-notch (they had those little finger sandwiches that I love.)

I hope to see you there!