--- layout: post title: Paper Tigers in NY Mag date: 2011-05-10 16:43:56.000000000 -04:00 categories: - Commentary on works - Culture and Society tags: [] status: publish type: post published: true meta: _edit_last: '7106425' author: login: samarthbhaskar email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>display_name: samarthbhaskar first_name: '' last_name: '' ---
Wesley Yang has a long-form piece in the NY Mag that cuts and weaves its away across some pretty important issues of gender, power, social-mobility and self-actualization as they manifest themselves for many Asian-Americans. Originally, I thought this piece was kind of a re-hashing of old issues, but after talking to some people and thinking more about it, I think it addresses some concerns that a lot of people don't afford themselves the opportunity to address. Although it winds up talking about the over-discussed Amy Chua controvery, I think its worth the read.
A short excerpt that I liked, maybe because I feel like I'm in this place in my life now -
Throughout my twenties, I proudly turned away from one institution of American life after another (for instance, a steady job), though they had already long since turned away from me. Academe seemed another kind of death—but then again, I had a transcript marred by as many F’s as A’s. I had come from a culture that was the middle path incarnate. And yet for some people, there can be no middle path, only transcendence or descent into the abyss.
I was descending into the abyss.


Cristovao L. Galambos
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Lack of forecast rains to prolong Australian bushfires threat
SYDNEY: Official weather forecasts for Australia out on Thursday (Nov 14) showed no substantial rains for at least three months, providing grim news as firefighters battle to get more than 100 bushfires raging across the east coast under control.
Wildfires in New South Wales and Queensland states have killed four people, destroyed hundreds of homes and wiped out 1 million hectares of farmland and bush over the past week.
The fires have been fuelled by tinder-dry conditions after three years of drought that experts say has been exacerbated by climate change, a factor that has sparked a sharp political debate in recent days.
Firefighters have said the blazes will burn for weeks without significant rainfall.
READ: Death toll in Australia bushfires rises to four
READ: New blazes break out as Australians take shelter from intense bushfires
Australia's Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) said there is just a 25 per cent chance that the country's east coast will receive average rainfall between Dec 1 and Feb 28.
Stoking the threat, BOM said there is more than 80 per cent chance that temperatures will exceed average levels over the next three months.
More immediately, Rural Fire Service NSW deputy commissioner Rob Rogers said fatigued firefighters face another challenging few days.
"Conditions are starting to warm up tomorrow, into the weekend and then heating up early next week, a return to more gusty conditions. We’re in for the long haul,” Rogers told Australia's Channel 7.
The death toll from the fires rose to four on Thursday after police reported the body of a man was discovered in NSW bushland that had been ravaged by fire.
CLIMATE POLITICS
Bushfires are common in Australia's hot, dry summers, but the ferocity and early arrival of the fires in the southern spring this year has caught many by surprise and stoked an increasingly acrimonious political debate about climate change.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has repeatedly batted away questions on that issue during the current crisis, drawing criticism from climate activists and opposition lawmakers.
A group of former fire chiefs on Thursday said the government's refusal to discuss climate change issues were impeding preparations for large-scale fires.
READ: Australia bushfires renew anger over climate change
Greg Mullins, a former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner, said he and 23 other fire and emergency chiefs had been trying to have a meeting with Morrison since April because they "knew that a bushfire crisis was coming."
Instead, he said current fire chiefs had been locked out of discussions and were "not allowed" to mention climate change.
"This government fundamentally doesn’t like talking about climate change," Mullins told reporters in Sydney.
Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said earlier in the week that linking the fires to the government's support of the coal industry was "the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies".


In addition to using vector resources in SHP, TAB, and other formats, you can define your own point data and import it as a resource into Google Earth Enterprise Fusion. To do so, you create delimited text files, such as CSV or tab-delimited TXT files.
Each text file must be paired with a configuration file in order for Google Earth Enterprise Fusion to parse the source data. The configuration file defines the source file structure, specifying field/value pairs and the type of delimiter used in the text file (that is, tabs or commas).
The configuration file must be a KDX file, have the same name as the CSV file, and be located in the same folder. For example, if you have a text file called fast_food_stores.csv
, the configuration file must be stored in the same folder with the name fast_food_stores.kdx
.
Tip: You can create the KDX file with a text editor, if you know the required format, or you can auto-generate it by importing the CSV file into Google Earth EC. Google Earth EC saves the KDX file in the same folder and with the same name as the original text file but with the .kdx
extension.
Your installation of Google Earth Enterprise Fusion includes a sample tab-delimited text file with a corresponding configuration file that you can examine. They are called web_cam.txt
and web_cam.kdx
and are located in:
/opt/google/share/tutorials/fusion/Vector
The following sections describe how to create the text and configuration file with Google Earth Enterprise Fusion.
The key to using your own delimited data with Google Earth Enterprise Fusion is the configuration file, which defines the structure of the data, the data fields, and the type of data contained in the fields. The following is an example of a configuration file:
Layout { FileType : "delimited" Delimiter : "," Latitude : "2" Longitude : "1" SkipRows : "1" FieldDefinitions { 0 { Name : "Name" Type : "string" } 1 { Name : "Longitude" Type : "double" } 2 { Name : "Latitude" Type : "double" } 3 { Name : "Comments" Type : "string" } 4 { Name : "URL" Type : "string" } } }
Notice that the first line of the file begins with the word Layout
and is followed by a curly brace that has its closing bracket in the last line of the file. This layout block is the basic structure in the configuration file. Each configuration file must start with a layout block. All settings within the layout block must appear inside of its curly braces {}
.
The FileType
value defines the text file type. The options are:
delimited
- Data fields are separated by tabs or commas.
fixedwidth
- Each data field has a fixed width.
If the file type is delimited
, you must indicate the delimiter type in the next line. Enter a comma (,) or an actual tab between the quotation marks.
The data location is defined by the Latitude
and Longitude
values.
The Latitude
value defines which column contains latitude data. The column count starts with 0. In the example above, the latitude column count is 2, which is the third column in the file. The required format for the Latitude
data is degrees. If your data uses degrees-minutes-seconds format, you must convert it to degrees by using the following formula:
Latitude = number of degrees + number of minutes/60 + number of seconds/3600
Record as many numbers after the decimal points as you can to ensure the accuracy of the latitude
value.
The Longitude
value defines which column contains longitude data. As with latitude, the column count starts with 0, and the format of the value is in degrees.
When you want to include a header row in the file for ease of reading but do not want to include it as part of the data Google Earth Enterprise Fusion reads from the file, you can use the SkipRows
keyword to indicate how many rows should be ignored. For example, the line:
SkipRows : "1"
indicates that Google Earth Enterprise Fusion should ignore the top row in the source file. If the source file contains more than one header row, indicate the number of rows within the quotation marks.
The Field Definitions block defines the column structure of the source file. The values for each column are defined in a separate block (indicated by curly braces), and the position of each column is indicated by its index number, starting with 0 for the first column and incrementing by 1 for each subsequent column.
The actual field definitions have the following values:
fixedwidth
, you must use the Length
keyword to define each column’s width, for example:
Length : "50"
Notes: Google Earth Enterprise Fusion is case-sensitive when reading the configuration file. In addition, the space between each line header and the subsequent colon (:) is required. Make sure that your configuration file has exactly the same syntax as the sample configuration file shown above.
If the configuration file for your source data is not set up correctly, or if the structure of your source file does not match the structure specify in your configuration file, Google Earth Enterprise Fusion generates an error message when trying to import your source data.
For your convenience, instead of creating a configuration file from scratch, you can copy the sample file to the folder where your source data is located, rename it, and then modify the content.
You can create your own custom icons in the graphics application of your choice for use on roads, points of interest, and other features in Google Earth Enterprise Fusion. When you do so, the following restrictions apply:
Note: If you change the image used for a custom icon name, it does not force you to rebuild projects that reference that icon. If that icon was previously referenced in a project that has already been built, when you publish a database that includes that project, the old icon appears. If something else in that project subsequently triggers a build, the new icon will appear in the resulting version.
Google Earth Enterprise Fusion’s auto-masking tool provides a very robust and dependable method of excluding fill data from imagery and terrain resources and requires the least investment of your time, since Google Earth Enterprise Fusion builds the mask itself. There are cases, however, where, in addition to fill data, some of the imagery within a resource should be masked out of view to produce the best quality imagery project.
This section describes how to create a custom mask, including how to create the necessary supporting files.
/gevol/assets/Resources/Imagery/ SFBayAreaLanSat.kiasset/product.kia/ver001
gemaskgen
command with the --extract
option. For example:
gemaskgen --extract raster.kip file-extract.tif
This command creates a preview image file called file-extract.tif.
gemaskgen --mask --feather 200 raster.kip file-maskold.tif
This creates a mask file called file-maskold.tif with a feather of 200 pixels.
Note: It could take a few minutes to generate the mask.
file-extract.tif
and file-maskold.tif
files created in steps 2 and 3 to another computer that has a graphics editing software application installed, such as Adobe Photoshop.
-mask
.
For example, if your original file is called trails.tif
, name your mask file trails-mask.tif
.
When you build the resource, Google Earth Enterprise Fusion looks for a file with the same name as the original source file with the -mask
ending, as described in step 6.


This demo showcases input system. The Magenta nodes are in scene-graph order, so that overlapping elements get input first.
The red node has prioritized order so gets input first even though is has overlapping Nodes.