Tag: South Korea

An Ig Nobel Prize for North and South Korea?

In 2020, India and Pakistan shared the Ig Nobel Prize for peace “for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.” The terms of the ongoing spat between North Korea and South Korea aren’t any less amusing and they may be destined for an Ig Nobel Prize of their own, even if animosity between the two countries — much like India and Pakistan — is rooted in issues with more gravitas.

North Korea has of late been sending balloons loaded with garbage over the border to the south whereas South Korea has stepped up its “psychological warfare” by blasting K-pop music over loudspeakers into the north. But as befits any functional democracy, the latter has run into trouble.

On June 17, Reuters reported the South Korean government faces “audits and legal battles claiming [the loudspeakers] are too quiet, raising questions over how far into the reclusive North their propaganda messages can blast”. Note: K-pop is propaganda because, per the same report, “These broadcasts play a role in instilling a yearning for the outside world, or in making them realize that the textbooks they have been taught from are incorrect,” according to Kim Sung-min, “who defected from the North in 1999 and runs a Seoul radio station that broadcasts news into North Korea”.

Apparently the speakers passed two tests in 2016 but failed subsequent audits, prompting the national defence ministry to sue the manufacturers. The court threw the case out because “too many environmental factors can affect the performance”. The ministry and the manufacturer have since made up, going by the fact that the ministry reportedly gave Reuters the same excuse when it was under fire over the speakers: environmental factors.

Imagine being the manufacturer who has to build a ridiculous set of speakers while being able to do nothing about the physics of sound propagation itself. The government wanted the K-pop to reach Kaesong, 10 km in from the border, whereas checks in 2017 found sound from the speakers could only get as far as 7 km, and in most cases managed 5 km. And to think the whole enterprise hinges on (a) North Korea being annoyed enough by the K-pop to blast music of its own in the opposite direction, at least to muddle the South Korean broadcast, and (b) South Korea’s claim that two soldiers defected from the North after listening to the music. Two.

Did they risk it all to turn the damned things off, you think?

Spotting scientists, lazy scientists

Indian scientists are lazy, says CNR Rao:

Bharat Ratna Prof CNR Rao on Wednesday said Indian scientists are “lazy” compared to those in countries like Japan, South Korea and China. “We are generally a lazy lot. If a person is angered by his superiors or something like that happened in Japan, he tends to work for an additional two hours. But in India, we stop working,” he said at a ceremony organized by the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology, and the department of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology to honour scientists and engineers.

Aside from my general displeasure about this man being accorded the prefix ‘Bharat Ratna’ at every mention, Rao has been coming across as a superficial commentator of late. Recently, while speaking at some event, he said that given as large a population as India’s, and making the safe assumption that a fixed fraction of it would have be significantly smarter than the rest, it was a tragedy that we still hadn’t spotted the country’s brightest scientists yet. This might make logical sense to many people but it absolutely should not to educators like Rao. He heads JNCASR and served as the prime minister chief scientific advisor in 2004-2014. To make India’s research excellence a matter of spotting is to abdicate the responsibility of nurturing these scientists. Who will you spot if you aren’t thinking about the best ways to create them?

And then this example of Japanese scientists working longer hours because they’re pissed with their bosses. What’s wrong with the Japanese? At least that was my first thought before I realised I couldn’t disparage Japan. It could be possible that they have a system that rewards hard work without bureaucracy getting in the way. We clearly don’t. I can work 10-times as hard as others in some Indian government offices but I sure as hell won’t receive proportionate appreciation for it. Similarly, I can’t expect people to work harder in any other setting if they think they aren’t going to get their dues, and I’d actively discourage them from doing so if it impacted their personal lives. So like in the previous instance, Rao sounds like he’s simply not thinking things through: calling scientists as a community ‘lazy’ is to abdicate the responsibility to make it easier for them to enjoy the fruits of their labours.

Also, let’s try to stop importing cross-border solutions for good governance?