Do Sports Make You Smarter? Study Finds Athletes' Brains Have More Gray Matter

BOCHUM - Intensive sports make our muscles grow – nothing new there. But now clinical neurophysiologists from Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) have shown that sports can change our brain too.
For their research, 26 high-performance athletes (half of them practitioners of judo and karate, the other half marathon runners and triathletes), and 12 non-athletes, had their brains imaged by MRI scanners.
The images revealed that in the part of the brain called the supplementary motor area (SMA), the athletes had significantly more gray matter.
"The RUB researchers found that the endurance athletes had more gray matter in both the SMA and the hippocampus than the non-athletes," said project head Professor Tobias Schmidt-Wilcke, head of Bochum’s Research Department of Neuroscience.
Gray matter is mainly comprised of neurons, while white matter is made up mostly of glial cells and myelinated axons that send signals within the cerebrum and between it and other parts of the brain. The researchers must now tackle the issue of whether the changes to the athletes’ brains come about because of cell growth or are due to stronger blood flow in the area. 
Brain researchers have long abandoned a once well-established theory that the structure of an adult brain doesn’t change. Says Schmidt-Wilcke: "Now we know that learning and training processes can lead to change."
Schmidt-Wilcke has already scheduled some follow-up research – he and his team intend to find out if the additional gray matter in the athletes’ brains has positive effects in other areas of life, for example at work: has their memory improved, can they crunch information and make decisions faster?
There’s some good news for those who have no intention of taking up endurance sports – according to Schmidt-Wilcke, walking increases hippocampus volume and also benefits long-term memory.

Who needs cyber-spying?

ON JANUARY 5th, in a night raid, a gang of criminals broke into a factory near Shanghai owned by Mercury Cable, an American manufacturer of high-voltage equipment. The thieves took not only raw materials but machinery from production lines as well.
Who was responsible? Todd Harris, the firm’s American boss, blames a gang led by a former manager at the plant. He claims local police have refused to take action despite repeated complaints, and that former employees and local officials are colluding to “set up a Chinese company making knock-offs.” Cybercrime may be sexier, but the hard reality for companies doing business in China is that old-fashioned skulduggery remains a bigger threat.

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The Mercury saga is a common tale. A foreign businessman comes to China with dollar signs in his eyes, struggles initially, then finds promising local managers who speak English, and he hands over the keys to his factory. He visits occasionally to woo local politicians over endless banquets. The business at last booms, until one day everything suddenly falls apart. Typically, the foreign firm loses vital intellectual property (IP) and assets, and cannot find any local remedy.

Boots on the ground

“The easiest way to get intellectual property from a firm is by buying or renting an employee inside it,” says Kent Kedl of Control Risks, a consultancy. He frequently encounters cases in China of Western clients losing technology, sensitive sales data or, as with Mercury Cable, entire production lines. Some criminal tribes operate inside the target firm and misappropriate its resources, while others use purloined property and know-how to start rival businesses after (or even before) leaving the firm.
The most dangerous local thieves are “PhD pirates”, says Peter Humphrey of ChinaWhys, a fraud-investigation consultancy. Such engineers and scientists may work quietly for years inside multinationals, especially in research-intensive industries like pharmaceuticals and chemicals, before striking. Mr Humphrey says there is a lively market for stolen intellectual property in China, and insists that “the massive expansion of Chinese patents is based on dubious ownership”.
What can companies in China do? Some Japanese firms allow only trusted employees from the home country to mix secret formulas. Other companies are rethinking the business-school mantra that senior managers must be localised rapidly in emerging markets since they know the markets best. The boss of a Western multinational which got burned in a local corruption scandal concluded that he did not know whom to trust in China, so he put foreign managers back in charge.
The chief technology officer of a Western chip-making giant says his firm has a research centre in China but “would never bring the crown jewels into the country.” He orders his team to smash (not wipe) laptops and mobile phones after visits. If the technology matters, “then don’t bring it to China as it will get stolen,” says Jay Hoenig of Hill & Associates, a consultancy.
Many companies are aware of the dangers, yet still fail to take enough precautions. One reason is naivety. It will not happen to me, think some. Another is that foreign bosses often do not speak Chinese, observes Mr Kedl, and are unaware of the local culture of “favour trading” that can lead employees to give away secrets. One other factor is pressure to show results quickly. Managers deploy the best technology in the country, knowing it is at risk, because they must do well in order to advance their career.
Problems also come from the Chinese requirement that foreign firms in “strategic” sectors transfer certain technologies to local partners. The snag is that it is hard to set up a factory in which some secrets are to be shared but not others.
A more nuanced explanation is that heavy-handed IP controls of the sort advocated by security experts run counter to the culture of collaboration and trust that innovative companies cherish. At such firms, executives know their technologies will leak out one way or another. “Staying out of China in hope of keeping our IP safe is obviously not an option,” says John Rice, vice-chairman of GE, a multinational conglomerate. It can be stolen anywhere in the world through cyber-hacking, he adds. At such firms, the best way of keeping ahead is by quickly inventing the next generation of technology.

Cristiano Ronaldo scores twice as Real Madrid crush Barcelona

Barcelona 1-3 Real Madrid
• Alba 89; Ronaldo 13pen 57, Varane 69
• Real win 4-2 on aggregate

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Cristiano Ronaldo is tripped by Gerard Piqué for the penalty that set up Real's win at Barcelona. Photograph: Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty Images

These were set to be eight decisive days – Barcelona away, Barcelona at home and Manchester United away – but the threat was always a promise too and here it was fulfilled, the first hurdle overcome with ease, over almost as soon as it had begun. Real Madrid are in the final of the Copa del Rey. Two goals from Cristiano Ronaldo early in each half left Barcelona an impossible task and the pain was far from over.
With the score 2-0 to Madrid on the night, 3-1 on aggregate, the Catalans were left to play the final half an hour more out of obligation than anything else. And then with 68 minutes gone, Raphaël Varane headed the third to bring José Mourinho's finger to his lips and make this another brilliant night. Jordi Alba's goal was irrelevant, clinched in the 88th minute before a half-empty stadium.
As the injured Madrid goalkeeper Iker Casillas said ominously afterwards: "This gives us more hope and confidence for the rest of the season: hopefully it can prove a turning point. We never really suffered tonight."
When it comes to head to head matches against Barça, Mourinho's Madrid have become the better side: the past six meetings have seen Madrid effectively clinch the league, win the Spanish Super Cup and now claim a place in the Copa del Rey final, as well as drawing 2-2 here in October. Ronaldo too has become more dominant than Leo Messi.
Trailing by 16 points, the league is Barcelona's but that did not feel like it mattered much here: this was humiliating for the home side, worrying too. The sheer speed of Mourinho's team was breathtaking. A place in the final brings with it confidence that they can win at Old Trafford in the Champions League. Barcelona, by contrast, know that on this form they have no chance against Milan. They were impotent again.
Madrid got the goal that changed the complexion of this tie before the quarter-hour mark and it was a portrait of the two sides. At times it appears to take little to score against Barcelona. The worrying thing from the perspective of Sir Alex Ferguson, here to watch the game, was how swiftly and unexpectedly Madrid can plunge the dagger into your heart.
At one end, Messi was bundled over by Angel Di María but as some Barça players appealed for a penalty, they wasted the free-kick. Suddenly, at the other end they were exposed. Ronaldo was running at Gerard Piqué; one step-over, two, and the defender was drawn in to a foul. This time there was no doubt and Ronaldo coolly rolled in the penalty, making this the sixth consecutive trip to the Camp Nou in which he had scored.
It was also the 12th consecutive game in which Barcelona had conceded and their task was now huge. Trailing 2-1 on aggregate, the away goal advantage gone, they were on a knife edge. Mourinho had the game where he wanted it. Barcelona had to score but knew that another Madrid goal and they would need three. It rarely looked like they would get even one. Messi dropped deeper, largely ineffective, Cesc Fábregas was lost and there was no presence in the area.
Messi's free-kick flashed just wide and Pedro Rodríguez felt he had been bundled over by Xabi Alonso but the few saves Diego López had to make were routine and when Madrid broke they did so with intent, led by Mesut Ozil and Ronaldo. If Barcelona began the second half with renewed intensity their efforts were stillborn. Sergio Busquets brought a sharp save out of López and Andrés Iniesta's shot was charged down when the ball dropped to him from a corner but a second later it was effectively all over.
A long ball from Sami Khedira, Di María ran at Carles Puyol and José Pinto saved his shot only for the ball to drop to Ronaldo, who brought it down on his chest and finished Barcelona off. There were 32 two minutes left but the cup tie was over.
On the touchline, David Villa had been warming up as the fans chanted his name and now he came on but it was too late, Varane powering home a header just as he had done in the first leg. When Alba scored it simply did not matter.

The price of reputation

EMBARRASSING pictures on Facebook show you dancing the hula naked at a frat party. A convicted bank robber in Texas has the same name as you—as every Google search makes all too clear. Such embarrassments would surely never befall you, dear reader. But they are common enough to spawn an entire business devoted to protecting and polishing people’s image online. Reputation.com, a Silicon Valley technology firm, is hoping that this year the market will finally fulfil its potential.
Reputation has 1.6m customers. For $99 a year or more they get a basic “reputation starter” package, which monitors when they are mentioned online and alerts them if anything sensitive comes up, such as “your real age, name, address, mugshots, legal disputes or marital problems”. For $5,000 a year, the firm will “combat misleading or inaccurate links from your top search results” (most people do not look at results much below the top page or two).

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The problem has been to create a profitable business. Although there has long been evidence of growing unease about online privacy, getting anyone to pay for greater control of their image has proved difficult. “A lot of companies have started with idealism about empowering the online user, only to find that the user wouldn’t pay,” says Esther Dyson, a technology investor, who nonetheless remains optimistic that this will change.
Michael Fertik, Reputation’s 34-year-old founder, thinks the change is now happening, helped along by several recent deals. In January Reputation acquired Reputation 24/7, a British competitor. It also began a partnership with Equifax, one of America’s big three consumer-credit monitoring firms, offering Equifax’s customers free access to Reputation’s basic online identity-monitoring and clean-up services. TransUnion Interactive, a competitor of Equifax, will roll out a similar arrangement with Reputation in the spring.
The next step is to launch a data vault—like a bank vault containing all the data that constitute a person’s reputation. It is the most important step in Mr Fertik’s idea not merely to give people more power over their data but to “invert the basic business model of the internet”. The current business model, as he describes it, is that giant firms give customers something free, collect data on them without their knowledge and sell it to third parties to do with whatever they like. “We want to turn it on its head, by [letting] the consumer… decide if they want to sell information about themselves to companies that want to get to know them.”
The upstart firms face some technology problems. Reputation is making progress in some areas, such as how to ensure the person whose online presence is being monitored is actually the person you think he or she is. But the biggest challenge is to find enough buyers and sellers to create a marketplace potentially worth billions. Mr Fertik reckons critical mass will come at around 10m individual customers and around 50 companies keen to pay for access to their data vaults.
Not everyone is convinced consumers will go for this. One boss at Microsoft argues that most people will find managing personal data too complex and that in practice online privacy will be secured by regulation, not products. In the past couple of years more firms have started to accept that personal data will be protected more strongly than before, whether by regulation—which is likely to be tightened in Europe and America—or through market mechanisms like those envisaged by Mr Fertik. Indeed, the data vault may usher in the sort of market-based solutions that “might discourage heavier regulation by Congress, where protecting privacy is one of the few genuinely bipartisan causes,” says Jon Leibowitz, the (outgoing) chairman of America’s Federal Trade Commission. “Reputation.com is very far ahead of the curve in trying to give consumers some control over their data,” he adds.
Reputation is not alone, though. It competes with a host of start-ups, from personal.com to mydex. Another firm, Snapchat, is tackling the problem at its source by allowing people to send photos to friends that erase themselves shortly after being viewed. Some big firms, including banks and maybe even current internet giants, will probably enter the new market. Some may even offer to buy Reputation. Mr Fertik is not fazed. His firm has the advantage of that most valuable thing, which it must protect at all costs: a good reputation.

Microsoft Research shows a promising new breakthrough in speech translation technology

A demonstration I gave in Tianjin, China at Microsoft Research Asia’s 21st Century Computing event has started to generate a bit of attention, and so I wanted to share a little background on the history of speech-to-speech technology and the advances we’re seeing today.
In the realm of natural user interfaces, the single most important one – yet also one of the most difficult for computers - is that of human speech.
For the last 60 years, computer scientists have been working to build systems that can understand what a person says when they talk.
In the beginning, the approach used could best be described as simple pattern matching. The computer would examine the waveforms produced by human speech and try to match them to waveforms that were known to be associated with particular words.
While this approach sometimes worked, it was extremely fragile. Everyone’s voice is different and even the same person can say the same word in different ways. As a result these early systems were not really usable for practical applications.
In the late 1970s a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University made a significant breakthrough in speech recognition using a technique called hidden Markov modeling which allowed them to use training data from many speakers to build statistical speech models that were much more robust. As a result, over the last 30 years speech systems have gotten better and better. In the last 10 years the combination of better methods, faster computers and the ability to process dramatically more data has led to many practical uses.
Today if you call a bank in the US you almost certainly are talking to a computer that can answer simple questions about your account and connect you to a real person if necessary. Several products on the market today, including XBOX Kinect, use speech input to provide simple answers or navigate a user interface. In fact our Microsoft Windows and Office products have included speech recognition in them since the late 90’s. This functionality has been invaluable to our customers with accessibility needs.
Until recently though, even the best speech systems still had word error rates of 20-25% on arbitrary speech.
Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough. By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods.
During my October 25 presentation in China, I had the opportunity to showcase the latest results of this work. We have been able to reduce the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8. While still far from perfect, this is the most dramatic change in accuracy since the introduction of hidden Markov modeling in 1979, and as we add more data to the training we believe that we will get even better results.
Machine translation of text is similarly difficult. Just like speech, the research community has been working on translation for the last 60 years, and as with speech, the introduction of statistical techniques and Big Data have also revolutionized machine translation over the last few years. Today millions of people each day use products like Bing Translator to translate web pages from one language to another.
In my presentation, I showed how we take the text that represents my speech and run it through translation- in this case, turning my English into Chinese in two steps. The first takes my words and finds the Chinese equivalents, and while non-trivial, this is the easy part. The second reorders the words to be appropriate for Chinese, an important step for correct translation between languages.
Of course, there are still likely to be errors in both the English text and the translation into Chinese, and the results can sometimes be humorous. Still, the technology has developed to be quite useful.
Most significantly, we have attained an important goal by enabling an English speaker like me to present in Chinese in his or her own voice, which is what I demonstrated in China. It required a text to speech system that Microsoft researchers built using a few hours speech of a native Chinese speaker and properties of my own voice taken from about one hour of pre-recorded (English) data, in this case recordings of previous speeches I’d made.
Though it was a limited test, the effect was dramatic, and the audience came alive in response. When I spoke in English, the system automatically combined all the underlying technologies to deliver a robust speech to speech experience—my voice speaking Chinese. You can see the demo in the video above.
The results are still not perfect, and there is still much work to be done, but the technology is very promising, and we hope that in a few years we will have systems that can completely break down language barriers.
In other words, we may not have to wait until the 22^nd century for a usable equivalent of Star Trek’s universal translator, and we can also hope that as barriers to understanding language are removed, barriers to understanding each other might also be removed. The cheers from the crowd of 2000 mostly Chinese students, and the commentary that’s grown on China’s social media forums ever since, suggests a growing community of budding computer scientists who feel the same way.

Microsoft Brings Star Trek’s Voice Translator to Life

It could be the next best thing to learning a new language. Microsoft researchers have demonstrated software that translates spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly, while preserving the unique cadence of the speaker’s voice—a trick that could make conversation more effective and personal.
The first public demonstration was made by Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, on October 25 at an event in Tianjin, China. “I’m speaking in English and you’ll hear my words in Chinese in my own voice,” Rashid told the audience. The system works by recognizing a person’s words, quickly converting the text into properly ordered Chinese sentences, and then handing those over to speech synthesis software that has been trained to replicate the speaker’s voice.
Video recorded by audience members has been circulating on Chinese social media sites since the demonstration. Rashid presented the demonstration to an English-speaking audience in a blog post today that includes a video.
Microsoft first demonstrated technology that modifies synthesized speech to match a person’s voice earlier this year (see “Software Translates Your Voice Into Another Language”). But this system was only able to speak typed text. The software requires about an hour of training to be able to synthesize speech in a person’s voice, which it does by tweaking a stock text-to-speech model so it makes certain sounds in the same way the speaker does.
AT&T has previously shown a live translation system for Spanish and English (see “AT&T Wants to Put Your Voice in Charge of Apps”), and Google is known to have built its own experimental live translators. However, the prototypes developed by these companies do not have the ability to make synthesized speech match the sound of a person’s voice.
The Microsoft system is a demonstration of the company’s latest speech-recognition technology, which is based on learning software modeled on how networks of brain cells operate. In a blog post about the demonstration system, Rashid says that switching to that technology has allowed for the most significant jump in recognition accuracy in decades. “Rather than having one word in four or five incorrect, now the error rate is one word in seven or eight,” he wrote.
Microsoft is not alone in looking to neural networks to improve speech recognition. Google recently began using its own neural network-based technology in its voice recognition apps and services (see “Google Puts Its Virtual Brain Technology to Work”). Adopting this approach delivered between a 20 and a 25 percent improvement in word error rates, Google’s engineers say.
Rashid told MIT Technology Review by e-mail that he and the researchers at Microsoft Research Asia, in Beijing, have not yet used the system to have a conversation with anyone outside the company, but the public demonstration has provoked strong interest.
“What I’ve seen is some combination of excitement, astonishment, and optimism about the future that the technology could bring,” he says.
Rashid says the system is far from perfect, but notes that it is good enough to allow communication where none would otherwise be possible. Engineers working on the neural network-based approach at Microsoft and Google are optimistic they can wring much more power out of the technique, since it is only just being deployed.
“We don’t yet know the limits on accuracy of this technology—it is really too new,” says Rashid. “As we continue to ’train’ the system with more data, it appears to do better and better.”

Teamwork Asian style

I have never believed that the idea of “teamwork” can work in the Asian context. I can still vaguely remember the first time I did teamwork with 3 colleagues from Asia in the student common room of the School of Education at the University of Leeds. It was to prepare for a group presentation.
We appointed a group leader, who was elected based on how old we were. Widely accepted social norms told us that this was the only “fair way” to have a leader in a small community, or group. Of course, we then expected the leader to tell us what to do next. Thanks to the “group presentation” workshop at the university, we understood that each PowerPoint slide of a presentation should roughly take 2 minutes and we only got 15 minutes for our presentation in total. Therefore, we estimated that we could only have about 8 slides, excluding the title and “Q vs A” slides. “Let’s divide the work”, our leader said, “8 slides divided by 4 people; that is 2 slides per person. Since I am the leader, I will do the first and last slide”. Teamwork was about reducing workload. This is the first lesson I learned about teamwork. The way I thought was that if my lecturer asked me to deliver a presentation alone, I would have to read 20 articles from the reading list (one A4 paper and single spaced!). However, if I had 4 colleagues or team members, I would only need to read one fifth of it and spend significantly less time on designing and writing the PowerPoint slides.

Learning Matters is a monthly column aiming to provide useful thoughts on learning and education in the hope of informing the broader discussion of educational development in Vietnam. The column is written by the Learning Skills Unit at RMIT International University Vietnam (www.lsuvietnam.com). Readers' feedback and questions can be sent to learningmatters@thanhniennews.com.

In our group, none of us read all the journal articles in the reading list. Problems happened in the final stage of our presentation, when some Arab classmates raised their hands and asked some questions. To be honest, when we presented the “question and answer” slide, it was only a polite gesture rather than an invitation for challenging questions. Then we need to quickly decide whose responsibility it was to answer these “annoying questions”, because frankly speaking, my attention to the presentation was gone immediately after I presented my part (2 PPT slides). I did not even understand what the questions were (or I chose not to listen to their questions). I did not expect someone to ask any questions. I guess my team members were facing the same problem at that moment, because we looked at each other with our mouths and eyes shockingly opened. Finally, under huge pressure, the group leader stood out and repeated the information in one of the slides (the slide he made). I did not think the audience was satisfied with his answer, because they asked us to give more examples with personal stories, not repeating the definitions of the theoretical concept again on the slide. None of us could help because none of us had read the articles about that theory. So what lessons I have learned from my previous teamwork experiences?

1. Teamwork has not been invented to reduce workload. Obviously teamwork is required at a nice restaurant in order to finish a barbecue seafood buffet among friends (Trust me, I’m Chinese!). But it is very different from teamwork in conducting academic presentations. However, teamwork actually creates more jobs for team members because they need to spend more time on communicating with each other.
2. Good teamwork is not only a process of dividing a project into pieces with each member completing one piece of it. It is about building a collective understanding. Therefore, it’s not appropriate to visualize teamwork in an academic setting like that of an assembly line in a car factory, where each worker is only in charge of making one small component of a vehicle.

My observations and teaching experiences at RMIT certainly indicate that some students may not get the point of completing a project in a collaborative way (e.g. a group presentation, a group assignment, a public event on campus). Here are some common complaints I and my colleagues often hear from students.

1. It’s unfair. I did a lot of work, while some guys (mainly boys) did not do anything. We ended up with the same score.
2. I feel frustrated because I was the only one who actually wrote the report. It was too much for me. I need some help. If I had stopped working, all of us would have failed this module.
3. I failed my group assignment last semester, but I feel it was not my problem. My team members did not work at all.

As you may notice, fairness and scores are always at the centre of discussion about teamwork. Interestingly, teamwork, as a collaborative learning tool, was originally introduced as an alternative way to enhance the learning process (rather than learning outcome), to promote critical thinking skills (rather than low level learning such as memorization) and to provide a platform for members to learn by discussing and sharing. So what kind of conclusion can I draw here?

1. It is inappropriate to only assess teamwork based on the final outcomes (no matter whether it is a presentation or assignment) of a project. The process, such as the evidence of collaborating, agreeing/disagreeing with each other, arguing, convincing and persuading, needs to be collected and rewarded.
2. Feedback from lecturers needs to address the weaknesses and strengths in organizing teamwork.
3. The differences between “assessing for learning” (to promote learning) and “assessing of learning” (to assess the skills/abilities) need to be addressed. Teamwork alone is not a valid way to assess students’ final achievement. It is problematic if a high-stakes assessment only uses teamwork to assess students’ final academic performance.

Joel Brinkley eats his words (and they don’t taste good)

When Joel Brinkley came to Vietnam in December, he heard no birds.
He saw no dogs out for walks.
“Where’d they all go?” he asked his reader, at the beginning of the month, in one of his weekly columns for the Tribune News Service. “You might be surprised to know: most have been eaten.”
Who is Joel Brinkley?
You might be surprised to know that he’s a 23-year veteran of The New York Times, a professor of Journalism at Stanford University and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Brinkley’s column, “Despite Increasing Prosperity, Vietnam’s Appetites Remain Unique” used a recent WWF report about the country’s dire wildlife epidemic as a springboard to diagnose its people as singularly aggressive. Prof. Brinkley concluded that this aggression had been brought on by centuries of eating weird meats.
He cites the unnamed work of anonymous “anthropologists and historians” as the basis of his argument.
“Pshaw,” wrote Christoph Giebel, an associate professor of history at the University of Washington who has written extensively on Vietnam. “Who would those be?”
Who, indeed?
Giebel’s confounded response to Brinkley’s writing was just one of many that I received after emailing the piece to several of Brinkley’s peers and posting it onto the Vietnam Scholar Group list serve.
The replies to both my emails and requests for comment varied. At least two scholars, who asked not to be named, categorized Brinkley’s work as racist, while two Southeast Asia specialists from Stanford’s East Asian Studies Department seemed to regard it as grounds for legitimate inquiry.
Meanwhile, a growing pool of incredulous locals, expatriates and journalists have emailed me demanding to know why the piece was published or even written.
“If I had not known that Professor Brinkley is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, I would not have taken this article seriously,” wrote Hong Kong Nguyen, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism who now works as a reporter for a private agency in Hanoi.
Nguyen said she was “enraged” by certain passages in the piece.
She was not alone.
“Brinkley's piece claims Vietnamese people are to a significant extent scavengers, eating whatever rats and stray dogs they find,” wrote Erika J. Peters, a food historian who has written extensively on Vietnam’s food ways and colonial history.
“Leaving aside periods of actual famine and starvation, that is completely unfounded. Furthermore, citizens of the United States have no standing to accuse the Vietnamese of military aggression. Consider how many overseas wars we fought against smaller countries in the twentieth century alone, compared to Vietnam's wars over a thousand years with an imperialistic China.”
Professor Michael Lestz of the History Department at Trinity College found Brinkley’s history rather retrograde.
“During the Vietnam War era and after, the Vietnamese were sometimes referred to as 'the Prussians of Southeast Asia,” he wrote via email. “This nomenclature overlooked the fact that many of the wars of Vietnamese history were defensive ones, whether against the Chinese, Mongols, Cham, or, for that matter, the French and Americans. Relating protein need and the wider patterns of national defense is tenuous at best.”
Brinkley himself seemed confused. In an article published by the SF Gate a week before, he described Vietnam as having been invaded by China 17 times. In the subsequent piece, he cites Vietnam’s defense against invasion as evidence of Vietnam’s aggression.
He also asserted that the people of Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia have mostly spent the last few centuries sitting around passively eating rice.
Professor David Chandler, one of the foremost scholars on Cambodia and the region, characterized Brinkley’s column “amazingly shallow.”
He pointed out that Thailand launched far more incursions into Cambodia than Vietnam, and that one could hardly describe Khmer people as more passive than Vietnamese people.
“To say Cambodians are ‘passive’ sounds odd, given the record of the Khmer Rouge or the violence of Cambodia's civil wars or the centuries when they dominated much of Southeast Asia,” he added. “They get ample protein from fish. This has had nothing to do as far as I can determine with either their warlike or passive qualities.”
Brinkley’s column includes just one actual Vietnamese person—the unnamed woman selling “rats” in Da Nang. The picture appeared in the SF Gate and the Chicago Tribune.
When I reached Brinkley, by telephone two weeks ago, he sounded exhausted and annoyed. 
When asked about the cross-border slaughters of Vietnamese civilians in the Mekong Delta that ultimately moved the nation to go to war with the Khmer Rouge, Brinkley snapped: “You know I’ve written a book about this.”
When pressed, he characterized the slaughters as “minor” or, possibly, things that never happened at all.
“Nobody knew what was going on then,” he said-a rather remarkable claim.
When asked how many civilians have to die before a war is considered “defensive” rather than “aggressive,” he said he didn’t know.
“That’s an unanswerable question.”
The interview proved as mind-bending as his column. What was Brinkley thinking? What was his point?
When asked if he really believed Cambodians were “passive,” he seemed to say that they have never been able to afford meat but, due to an innate cultural virtue, have not deigned to eat wildlife-a claim Brinkley seemed unwilling or uninterested in supporting with citations, quotes or evidence.
He repeatedly insisted upon his extensive experience and authority on the subject. But the only person he quoted in his piece was an anonymous Western blogger who declared that he could “not imagine anything more gruesome” than someone eating a dog for dinner.
“I could not agree more,” Brinkley wrote.

Joel Brinkley, a professor of Journalism at Stanford University and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize

When I asked him if he actually couldn’t imagine anything more gruesome than someone eating a dog, he scoffed.
“Well isn’t that a silly question?” he asked.
It was, I admitted.
But was it anywhere near as silly as writing an editorial describing a nation that had spent its entire existence defending itself from invasions as singularly aggressive and then attributing that aggression to its diet?
Brinkley responded that we would have to agree to disagree on that point.
“Look man,” I finally said. “You covered a genocide. Is the idea of eating a dog even in the upper registers of gruesome things that you can imagine?”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
That was about as much as any of us have been able to get Brinkley to admit.
After a flood of outraged comments posted on the Tribune website, Brinkley posted a defense of his piece on Jim Romenesko’s media blog. His response was written to a weak defense of Vietnam offered by ex-New York Times writer Paul Von Zielbauer. “Vietnamese people – despite the taste among some for certain kinds of food that we may find offensive – are lovely people to a remarkable degree,” Zielbauer wrote.
After owning that his dietary argument “was perhaps not as well phrased as it could have been,” Brinkley dug even deeper into his claims and posted a picture of the Da Nang woman cleaning rodents.
I can tell you, as an American, that Brinkley and Von Zielbauer wouldn’t dare to pontificate on the dietary habits of a particular race of people at home, much less hold a public debate on whether that groups is “aggressive” or “lovely… to a remarkable degree.”
Vietnamese people are people. They love. They fight. They eat different things. Some of them are jerks. Some of them are nice. Some of them are all of these things and more, depending on the day that you meet them.
But Brinkley proved himself almost as poor a historian and ethnographer as a journalist.
Had he been truly interested in the illegal wildlife trade, he could have gone to any number of illicit restaurants that have been identified by this newspaper and written about animal consumption that actually threatens the region’s ecology rather than grosses out tourists.
He could have gone to Nghe An, where village posses have literally murdered dog thieves or he could have taken a walk, anywhere, and met plenty of rats and cats and dogs that no one has any interest in eating.
For god’s sake, he might have even sat down and eaten a field mouse or a dog to get some sense of why people actually do it and who they are.
Instead, he snapped a few photos of domestically raised animals he found disgusting and then dashed off a snide opinion piece couched as a piece of analysis.
The worst part is that Brinkley hasn’t come to terms with what he did.  And no one has forced him to do so.
The Tribune Media Services has posted this rather incoherent notice at the end of the piece:
“Tribune Media Services (TMS) recently moved an opinion column by Joel Brinkley about his observations from a trip to Vietnam that did not meet our journalistic standards,” the statement read.  
“TMS has a rigorous editing process for its content, and in the case of Brinkley’s column that moved January 29, all the required steps did not occur. We regret that this happened, and we will be vigilant in ensuring that our editing process works in the future.”
If that weren’t embarrassing enough for Brinkley the Chicago Tribune felt the need to issue its own retraction:
On February 2, Standards Editor Margaret Holt posted a brief statement noting that Brinkley’s column had “offended many people, including those of Asian American descent.”
Holt thanked everyone for their comments which, she said, “have generally been thoughtful and added to the public understanding of the controversy.”
The thing is, by Tuesday night, neither the paper nor the service actually took the piece down—they just removed all the outraged comments.
In the meantime, Jason Nguyen of Chicago established an online petition demanding that Brinkley resign from his post at Stanford University. Nguyen had gathered 50 signatures by Tuesday night, at which point, Brinkley issued a response.
He asked everyone to remember that his opinions are his own and not those of Stanford University’s. 
Then he apologized. Sort of.
“For those of you who have signed the petition, and others who are upset, please accept my regret,” he wrote. “I will keep your point of view in mind when I write about Vietnam again.”
No one appears to be particularly excited for when that next time will come.
The petition for Brinkley’s resignation has since soared to 1,500 signatures and the Asian American Journalists and the Stanford Vietnamese Students’ Associations both published pieces further condemning Brinkley’s piece.

Vietnam's Tech Industry Strives To Prove It's A World-Class Hub Of Outsourcing Providers

Behind an unmarked door on the second floor of a new commercial park located just a few blocks north of the border from Ha Dong province is the Hanoi branch of VietGest, one of a thousand companies in Vietnam’s burgeoning software development industry. The small four-room office houses a young team of 15, average age 25.  The software developers enjoy air conditioning on full blast in their room. The support staff and junior software engineers make do with fans to stave off Hanoi’s sweltering heat.

VietGest developers in an air conditioned room in Hanoi.

VietGest is part of the rapidly growing USD $2.3 billion dollar software and digital content industry in Vietnam. According to Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communication, the industry has grown an average of 20-25% year over year since 2001.  As India grows wealthier, global companies have begun looking elsewhere for low-cost technology outsourcing opportunities. NeoIT cites IT labor costs are 40% less expensive in Vietnam than in China and India. A.T. Kearney’s Global Services Location Index and KMPG Advisory predict Vietnam will be one of the next outsourcing hubs for software development.
The Vietnamese telecom giant FPT also dominates the global outsourcing provider market in Vietnam. Its outsourcing team of 3,800 brought in $62.5 million last year. Nguyen Thi Dan Phuong of FPT said, “Our market share is roughly 21% of Vietnamese outsourcing to global market.”

While FPT may cast a long shadow, a myriad of software companies of different sizes, histories, and target markets characterize the vibrancy of Vietnam’s growing technology industry.

VietGest represents a startup.  Hoang Viet Tung, 30 years old, and Vu Minh Tuan, 28 years old, founded the company in 2010, when the pair returned home after studying abroad in Switzerland. VietGest specializes in serving French-speaking companies. Tuan runs the Hanoi office while Tung manages a team of 50 in Ho Chi Minh City.

After FPT, the second largest software outsourcing company based in Hanoi is VietSoftware International (VSII), which started as a subsidiary of VietSoftware, Inc. and spun off as its own company in 2006.  VSII is IBM’s biggest Offshore Delivery Center (ODC) in Vietnam. The core team has been in outsourcing since 2000 and it has grown to 200 engineers. Like most other providers of global outsourcing, VSII executive leaders trained abroad.  CEO Le Xuan Hai, who co-founded VietSoftware, studied in Australia and worked in Germany while Director of Global Business Development Tran Luong Son earned his PhD in Russia and his Master’s in the US.

In terms of high tech development, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is to Hanoi what Silicon Valley is to Seattle. One of the industry’s pioneers is TMA, a privately held company based in HCMC with 1,200 engineers. TMA is among the small number of Vietnamese software companies with more than 1000 employees. Bui Ngoc Anh, a rare female in a male dominated world, started TMA in her living room with six engineers in 1997. Today, her husband, Nguyen Huu Le, runs the company. Le is a Vietnamese Australian with an Australian doctorate and 22 years of experience at Nortel. Le said TMA pulled in $22 million in 2012.

All three companies share a sense of national pride to prove through providing outsourcing to global clients that Vietnamese software engineers are among the best in the world.

Le said, “The vision of the founder was ‘To Be One of the Top Offshore Developers and help put Vietnam on the World Map of Offshore Development by Exemplary Quality and Customer Focus’.”
Regardless of company size, Vietnamese software companies that provide outsourcing face similar challenges. “First, competition with peers from other emerging countries, notably India,” said Tran Tai, a RMIT Vietnam Lecturer. “Second, difficulty in recruiting enough IT talent to satisfy larger projects. Third, considering shrinking margin, some firms are looking at developing its own IT products. However, sales and marketing is a key issue.”

Although English is widely studied, Vietnam lags far behind India in this area.

Le said, “Even though the level of verbal English communication of Vietnamese ICT engineers has improved significantly, there’s still a gap with the need of international business.”
Then there is learning the language of Western business management.

When TMA started in 1997, there were just a few Vietnamese software companies that specialized in outsourcing.  Le said one of TMA’s biggest challenges was “To build a company with Western management style in order to compete in the world market. Vietnam’s software industry at that time lacked experience in modern management practices and international business.”

Embracing Western leadership styles himself and in true Silicon Valley fashion, Le is dubbed “Chief Mentor” at TMA.

TMA has its own special training programs (photo provided by TMA).

To better serve their foreign clients, Vietnamese software outsourcing providers strive to understand what their clients value and how they work and think.

In Asia, the belief “leaders are born” prevails while in the West, many assume “leaders can be made.”  To simulate some aspects of the work environment of their foreign clients, all three companies employ “soft skills” training. While “hard skills” means technical expertise, “soft skills” requires having Emotional Intelligence and knowing how to interact and build relationships with others. The concept of “soft skills” is still so foreign in the Vietnamese work place that no Vietnamese name exists for it; the original English must be invoked.

Those with strong soft skills will be able to bring out the best thinking, creativity, and innovation in others.

Tuan said, “We are influenced by our Asian culture. We’re more careful, risk-averse. We’re not as flexible.” Acknowledging their cultural tendencies, VietGest takes extra conscientious efforts to train their staff.

On Saturdays, the VietGest employees participate in additional soft skills or non-technical training researched and organized by alternating team members. This way, more team members get opportunities to lead and VietGest does not need to hire outside resources.

VietGest has a unique policy of encouraging anyone who wants to be team lead to try it for a month and if the candidate and the team feel it’s a good fit, the candidate may remain in that role. Although several have tried, Tuan said, “No one has wanted to stay. But after the month, the person has greater empathy and appreciation for what it takes to manage a team.”

While the number of students choosing to study information computer technology has increased by 70% since 2006, the talent pool is still very limited. Companies must make cost-effective decisions in their recruiting strategy to remain competitive.

VietGest works with local universities to find interns from whom they will hire. Tuan said he prefers “fresh” engineers that he can train.
At VSII, Hai and Son said they like to hire engineers with at least a few years of experience who share their long term vision of the company. VSII is competing for talent not just with local companies but with foreign giants in Vietnam.

“Many of our engineers studied or worked abroad or worked for foreign companies here before coming to VSII. They are the future of the company,” said Son.
TMA has the most robust system for recruiting and training. Aside from hiring from interns, they have their own training center, from which they recruit the best students to work for TMA
Vietnamese companies that specialize in outsourcing have the added challenge of trying to get their employees to approach work like their foreign clients while incentivizing and managing the team in ways that make sense to the Vietnamese.

Vietnamese culture puts a high value on community and family. VSII sponsors family trips and rents a two story room inside a multi-company office complex to serve as a cafeteria exclusively reserved for VSII employees.

“Renting a separate cafeteria is a great expense but it makes our employees feel special, valued, and respected,” said Hai. The room is decorated in bright citrus tones with plastic ivy hanging from the ceiling and a sign in English that reads “Have a Good Lunch.”

VSII cafeteria reserved for VSII employees

There are even gifts for the children of VSII employees. Whenever a VSII employee gives birth, she is presented with a silver spoon. In the Vietnamese context, the spoon is used for cạo gió or “spooning”, a form of Vietnamese folk medicine where repeated pressured strokes are applied with the smooth edge of a spoon or coin over skin lubricated with a medicinal oil.

When Vietnam first began outsourcing software development services, companies faced challenges building trust and brand recognition globally.

“Improvements to Vietnam’s legal system in recent times mean foreign software developers can have greater level of confidence outsourcing to local developers provided they follow good business practices and ensure they localize their contracts suitably,” said Giles Cooper, a partner at the law firm Duane Morris Vietnam.

Le believes the biggest challenge that remains is still in winning new clients through marketing and sales. “Few companies have an overseas presence so sale and marketing activities mostly come from Vietnam, which is not very effective in attracting foreign clients,” he said. TMA has five overseas offices along with its six domestic sites.

Smaller companies are following suit. VietGest is about to expand its sales force in France to more than 20 people and they plan to open an office in the US in the future. They expect their company will grow by 120% next year.

Amid predictions Vietnam’s economic bubble will burst, companies in the outsourcing sector are confident they will not be hurt because “they rely on revenue from foreign clients and reinvestment, not heavy capital inflow,” said Tai.

If the promises for Vietnam’s outsourcing potential holds true, VietGest may find itself needing more office space soon.

Joel Brinkley sorry for labeling Vietnam aggressive

Stanford University professor and Pulitzer-winning journalist Joel Brinkley told Tuoitrenews he “incorrectly” phrased an argument in his recent controversial article that named Vietnam “an aggressive country” just because the Vietnamese eat meat. Now he wants to label Vietnam as “robust” instead.
He told Tuoitrenews that he would change that “badly phrased … part about meat and aggression” if he had a chance.
“I would call the Vietnamese more robust than their neighbors,” the professor said.
His article, published February 1 on the Chicago Tribune, has caused an online outrage from Vietnamese and other people around the world.
Some protested that Brinkley, a former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, was directly attacking Vietnamese culture while others said point blank that he exaggerated what he had seen in the country.
One person even created an online petition to call for his resignation as a professor of journalism at Stanford.
Chicago Tribune then released a note saying that his piece “did not meet our journalistic standards” and “all the required steps did not occur” even though it “has a rigorous editing process for its content.”
In the op-ed “Despite increasing prosperity, Vietnam's appetites remain unique” published, Brinkley said that the Southeast Asian country’s long history of warfare is tied to its penchant for eating meat, especially rats, dogs, and birds.
The professor tried to create an impression that Vietnamese have gobbled down nearly all animals in the country after hearing anecdotes about locals’ eating habits from “many people, mostly ordinary citizens” during his ten-day visit to Vietnam in late December 2012 and early January 2013.
The man could not tell Tuoitrenews how many people he had met here prior to writing the controversial article because he “didn’t count.”
He wrote in the op-ed that “You don't have to spend much time in Vietnam before you notice something unusual … No dogs out for a walk … Where'd they all go? You might be surprised to know: Most have been eaten” because “the favored dish is dog” in this country.
Brinkley then revealed to Tuoitrenews he “didn't conduct a survey” to conclude that dog meat is a local favorite but was told about it by, again, “many people.”
Below is an interview between Tuoitrenews and Joel Brinkley following the publishing of his article:
How many times have you visited Vietnam so far? When did you last visit this Southeast Asian country? How long did you stay here before writing the controversial article?
Four or five times, and this column came off of a ten-day visit in late December 2012 and early January 2013.
What do you think about the angry reactions to your article by Vietnamese and international readers? Did they misunderstand you?
I've been writing about foreign countries for nearly 40 years, including nearly 25 as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and six years as a syndicated columnist.
Lots of people dislike some of the things I write. A journalist, especially an opinion columnist, expects that. But never in my long career have I ever received a reaction as intense as this. Never. Someone started a petition at Change.org to have me fired from Stanford, and as of now about 750 people, most of them Vietnamese, have signed it. As I said, I have never experienced anything like this.
Did you meet or interview anyone in Vietnam before writing the article? How many people did you meet here?
I traveled from Saigon to Hanoi in the trip last month and spoke to many people, mostly ordinary citizens. I didn't count.
What are you going to respond when people complain that your piece of writing paints a wrong picture of Vietnamese wildlife? Foreigners who once visited or are living in Vietnam say that Vietnamese do not “eat up” animals in the country as you claimed. Do you want to clarify anything?
I know this is not a universal habit nationwide, but I know what I saw with my own eyes from the people I spoke to. I was traveling with some others, and we all remarked on the dearth of wildlife.
What is the basis for your argument that eating meat makes people more aggressive?
That was badly phrased, and I am sorry for that. Meat does not make you aggressive all by itself. But Vietnam's diet does make people more robust than their counterparts in neighboring states. I know because I've spent a great deal of time in Cambodia, and some in Laos. I just published a book about Cambodia and spent many months traveling around that country, meeting and interviewing people. I've also spent some time doing the same in Laos.
In response to criticisms, you said that “eating a diet rich in protein will make you more robust than others, in Laos, Cambodia and other Southeast Asian states who eat rice and very little else. After all half of Laotian children grow up stunted, even today. In Cambodia the rate is 40 percent. That means they grow up short and not so smart.” A large number of people have voiced their online protest against this, saying you sounded even more offensive to Cambodians and Laotians than to the Vietnamese. What is your opinion?
As I said, I know a lot about Cambodians. That's the dictionary definition of stunting. I have written it many times in many forums. No one has ever complained about that formulation before.
Where did you get the information that “the favored dish is dog” in Vietnam? Did you conduct any survey on that?
No, I didn't conduct a survey. But many people told me that, and many people, Vietnamese and others who have lived there, have written that.
You seemed to repeatedly address Vietnamese eating habits in a not-so-nice way. What do you think when online comments dismissed that as ethnocentrism?
What prompted me to write that was the World Wildlife Fund report last year saying Vietnam mistreats wildlife more than any other state on earth. That, to me, made the eating habits newsworthy.
If you had a chance, would you change what was written in that article given such harsh criticisms?
I would have rephrased the part about meat and aggression. I phrased that incorrectly.
How should you have changed it? Would you still call Vietnam "an aggressive country"?
I would call the Vietnamese more robust than their neighbors, most of whom eat rice and not much else. They ingest little protein. In the many months I spent in Cambodia writing my book on that state, I found passiveness and lassitude among so many people.
A common phrase I heard in Vietnam was this: "Vietnamese grow rice. Laotians watch the rice grow. Cambodians listen to it grow."

Read more: http://tuoitrenews.vn/cmlink/tuoitrenews/society/joel-brinkley-sorry-for-labeling-vietnam-aggressive-1.98176#ixzz2L8Aoa000