Okay, this is weird. You'll be aware of the fuss over Google acceding to the Chinese regime's demand for censorship of results via the new Google China site. And, as every blogger and his dog has been demonstrating, if you do a Google Images search on "tiananmen square", you will find various regime-approved pictures, from tourist snaps to mugshots of "protest planners". But if your search is "Tiananmen square" (note the capital "T"), it brings up multiple instances of the iconic brave-student-versus-the-tanks photograph, among others.
The same principle holds for standard text searches. The top result in a search for "tiananmen square" is this bit of "biggest square in the world" tourist puff, while for "Tiananmen square" it's the Wikipedia entry on the 1989 protests.
Derek Tearne of @URL drew my attention to this, but confesses that he hasn't been able to work out why it should be so either, beyond speculating that "there's a difference between how it treats POST form submissions and GET URLs".
He also notes that results can be considerably skewed by the way you fiddle with the country codes. For instance, here is a search request with the syntax "http://images.google.cn/images?cr=countryCN&q=Tiananmen+square". Back to the friendly tourist snaps. And compare to the same search with the country code substituted as USA and NZ (note that the top result is Rodney Hide's blog).
Derek: "It looks what Google is doing is skewing the results towards sites from local domains - which appears far less like censorship than one assumes at first glance. After all, if I search for Auckland I'd rather get pictures of Auckland New Zealand than Auckland Castle UK."
Some more: if you search for "hardcore porn" in Google China Images (and I am not for a moment suggesting you do) you get what I presume to be a safe search-type message in Chinese; click the web search link above the search window and you get more New Zealand-skewed results and a URL with a "NZ" country code. Hit return to conduct the exact same search from the web search page and you get a different set of results. I need hardly remind you that these are not worksafe searches …
I'd be grateful if anyone knows a bit more and can shed light on this.
Meanwhile, Just Left had a discussion thread on the latest PC outrage to be targeted by The Eradicator - that "During this year’s census, every person will be asked whether they want the census form in English or in Maori." Actually, this is bollocks. As the Stats NZ press release says, a limited number of bilingual forms have been printed for delivery to areas with a high Maori population or a high number of Maori speakers.
"When did we have the debate on whether New Zealand should become bilingual?" asks Mapp. Maybe around the time Parliament passed the Maori Language Act 1987, says No Right Turn.
Mapp's arse-about take on the census issue comes from a very earnest speech in which he plods through an attempted classification of the different sorts of political correctness. In its attempt to retrospectively rope in any number of disparate phenomena (airline flying policies to allegedly banned lolly scrambles to traffic planning and invasive plant control) to its theory, it reads oddly like some desperate lefty thesis from the 70s, where everything is ideological.
There are genuine and worthwhile complaints tucked into it, but they are diminished and trivialised by their inclusion in this sprawling, tenuous taxonomy. And I'm sorry, but the Ministry of Social Development deciding to refer to children with "additional needs" rather than "special needs" just does not get me going even the tiniest little bit - and I have a direct interest in this. Is Wayne suggesting we just get back to the good old days and call them "retarded"?
Seriously: with Labour looking tired, and some intellectual firepower in its new intake, National has a chance to express new ideas and outline a vision. This sort of Muriel Newman blather is certainly not that.
Also: Gordon Dryden noted this release on the 2006 IBISWorld Global Performance Index. For all the kvetching about our performance relative to Australia, it ranks us a place above our Aussie cousins, although we've both dropped out of the Top 10 since last year, with roughly the same economic problems - high dollar, high current account deficit - affecting NZ to a greater degree. New Zealand's government performance - based on perceived lack of corruption, civil liberties and debt levels - is ranked No.1 in the world.
I've got the BBC Horizon documentary War On Science - which looks at the "intelligent design" movement - but haven't had a chance to watch it yet (torrent here if you fancy it). A survey conducted alongside the programme discovered a surprising number of Britons want faith to be taught in science classes.
And Christiaan Briggs alerted me to this hilarious video of NBC's Keith Olberman handing Fox's Bill O'Reilly his pompous ass. Heh.