WEI, Jian’s blog

During years of research at graduate school, I become aware that there are many mistakes in the literature, sometimes even wrong results got published and got more citations than the right ones. However, usually nobody will tell you exactly which are wrong and you just easily got lost in the large amount of literature that keeps piling up.

To save us some precious time so we can enjoy doing something else, e.g. blogging here, we could use a literature system that marks clearly which paper is the classic one and which one is just wrong. In a sense this is like a review system by experts and could look like a tree graph with the classical paper at the beginning of the tree.

The APS online PR series already benefit us a lot with the citing article links. But a database can be more useful if there is some guidance to it, e.g. an extra mark for each paper showing the importance, the originality of the paper etc. The overall efficiency of the scientific community can be much higher this way.

Although this sounds like a sweet dream, but there is indeed something similar in the mathematician’s community, check this http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/. Although this is about people not about papers, similar plot could be also useful for physics students.

I think that democracy requires active participation of qualified citizens.

In U.S., the middle class majority, not the elite minority, dominates the policy making process.

In China, so far we do not have such a well developed middle class, so pursuing the ultimate democracy will only leads to riots and setbacks of the society. This has been proved by the history of ancient China.

However, I do think the government should be responsible to educate and encourage the future middle class, since that will make a better society eventually. Right now, since we are a developing country, we can still kind of benefit from the experiences of those developed countries, but eventually China needs to face a lot challenges by itself and democracy will help for making the right decision.

Democracy is like an expensive musical instrument. You do not benefit from it a lot when you just started to learn it and at the same time you are a poor guy and struggling for a living, but eventually it will lead you to a higher level of peace and enjoy.

The current situation in China isn’t pleasing. I do not have too much hope for my generation, i.e. those born in middle 70s. For most of my friends and myself, I do not see the necessary elements (experiences and ambitions) that are important to propagate democracy. One example, of the many students in U.S., only very few is willing to service in the student association. For the even younger generation, especially those in China right now, materialism seems to be prevailing.

Although the increasing usage of Internet, could be a chance to educate more people and make people aware of the policy making process. But it seems that will only happen when more open-minded leaders come into the play, and some of them could be from the current students in U.S.

The best solution, as once said by one of our famous leader Deng Xiaoping, is probably to start from kids.  To educate the younger generation and make more of them willing to be a leader, like to collaborate with others, and respect each other’s choices etc, would be one of the most useful things a government can try. In this respect, I do think that lots of money invested by China in higher education and research can be more meaningful if spent in elementary education. Private school might be another choice, but again, it is like chicken and egg dilemma: without the majority middle class, there wouldn’t be many private schools.

In short, I believe that the road to democracy in China will be rough but the government can play an important role.

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