Thai cooking in Spanish

Recently inspired to find more simple solutions to making a video, finally got into editing on iMovie, and cut a DVD earlier produced into 4 minute shorts to upload to YouTube....



There's also more (cooking vdos in Spanish) to come at my YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/netnapitasakorn?feature=mhum

"Stop calling them 'developing countries'" from Gapminder

The term "Developing Countries" might have made sense once.

Today it's impossible to make a clear distinction between "developing" and "developed" countries.

In 1950, most of the so-called "developing countries" had more than 5 children per women and less than 50 years of life expectancy.

Today, in most of the world, women have less than 3 and life expectancy is over 65 years.

Any attempt to divide the countries of the world into two groups, such as "developing and developed countries" will be an over-simplification.

Click play on the graph in the link below to see how the world has changed since 1950.

www.bit.ly/9DwNBE

The middle income trap

The Nation on Sep. 12, published an article announcing ADB's approval of a $300mn loan to Thailand to develop its capital market. The 15 year period loan is to be used in support of the Thai government's Capital Market Development Master Plan for 2009-13 for the development of the equity market, bond market and money market in four areas: regulatory environment; market efficiency, liquidity and transparency; market infrastructure; and new products and investors. 

The government has made substantial headway in developing Thailand's capital market. Recent measures included establishing a timetable for the demutualisation of the Stock Exchange of Thailand, strengthening the surveillance and enforcement capabilities of the Securities and Exchange Commission, moves to develop the domestic bond market, and simplifying taxes on financial transactions. There has also been activities organised to improve public financial literacy.

What caught my interest was the mention of the capital market development plan's goal to help the country "transform from a middle-income to high-income economy through increased contribution of the domestic capital market to financing domestic investment and economic growth".

"The middle income trap" seems to be a recent development agenda that is being 'pushed around' at the moment. I remembered having recently read an article at Time about Malaysia's dilemma with this interesting concept. I had felt then that the writer didn't do much justice for Malaysia. However, it seems that this economic criticism is gaining some weight among policy makers. Here are a couple of related articles:

The Star, "Caught in middle income trap"

China Law Blog, "China, Malaysia, Korea And The "Middle Income Trap"

From an economist's blog, "Getting out of the middle income trap"

From a Vietnamese point of view, "Avoiding the middle-income trap: renovating industrial policy formulation in Vietnam"

From an Indian point of view, "The middle income trap" and "The challenge is to escape the middle income trap"

Of course, moving towards a higher income economy is a desired goal, but I can't help wondering. Is the simple focus on "income" levels obscuring other desired developmental goals? Like income distribution for one? Does higher income come with skewered income distribution? If it does, well, maybe it's okay to be "stuck" for a while, until those higher income countries can show us that people with lower income in their countries are receiving desired benefits of higher income, let's say... a good welfare service system for one, no?

Some recommendations of how to escape the middle income trap:

• a managed growth program with higher income, stronger currency, while maintaining a flexible foreign exchange regime and inflation control targets
• a more efficient capital market, availability of capital for sme and local firms to grow
• R&D spending
• tax reform (capital gain tax)
• investment in human resources
• developing an ability to produce and contribute to the global economy via home grown innovations

Economics aside, I think there are other socio-political issues that can cause a country to be stuck, my own list:

• political instability, stunted political development
• corruption
• a polarized society
• debt
• lack of investment in infrastructure and human capital
• energy self-sufficiency

To cap off, I found this interesting and useful guide, from You can read the Bangkok Post, by Jon Fernquest, "Avoiding the middle income trap: The challenges ahead for Thailand"

Linguistic diversity in Thailand

Recently meeting a linguistic student the other day, I surprised him by declaring that Kmer and Thai did not belong to the same family group. He thought they belonged to the same linguistic family.  I had a vague memory of a classification of the three large linguistic families of Southeast Asian languages I had read in Joachim Schiiesinger's "Ethnic Groups of Thailand: Non-Tai Speaking Peoples of Thailand" (published by White Lotus Press, 2000.)  I looked up this book as soon as I got home, just to make sure I hadn't made a rash declaration. Sure enough, page 8, a diagram, adapted from James A. Matisoff, "Linguistic Diversity and Language Contact", in John MacKinnon and Wanat Bhruksasri, eds, Highlanders of Thailand (Oxford University Press, 1983): The three linguistic superstocks of Southeast Asia:

1. Austro-Asiatic, to which belongs the languages of Munda (India), Nicobarese, Mon-Kmer (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand, China, Assam), and Aslian (Malaysia).
2. Austro-Thai, to which belongs the sub-family languages called Austronesian, Tai-Kadai, and Mioa-Yao.
3. Sino-Tibetan, subdivided into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman.

Now if you're not a linguist (which I'm not, but I'm an extremely curious person), it's easy and forgivable to make a simple and common conclusion that people of same geographic region will be speaking similar and related languages. However, it turns out that Southeast Asia is one of the most diverse and linguistic regions of the world. My new linguist friend, who specialized in Spanish and is more interested in learning about prehispanic languages, of course, was not expected to know this.

How would you explain to people who don't have a clue, the minefield of linguistics? What exactly do linguists do? Well, my husband's niece who had decided to go into that field of study, is now working on the construction of a dictionary of Spanglish, of all things. I met another, who worked with a computer software company, using her speciality in Latin, putting a natural order to computer programming. Then, there's a blogger I avidly follow who doesn't write so much about linguistics as much as she writes about Thai cooking!

Wikipedia says, "linguistics is the scientific study of natural language". It also goes on to say that there are several sub-fields (ie, grammar and semantics), and sub-disciplines (ie, evolutionary liguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition, discourse analysis, and pragmatics), and even relate fields (like phonetics). Interestingly, "outside the field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages fluently".

So from the understanding derived from reading the above wiki article, the classification of family languages falls under historical linguistics, branching out from philology, the study of ancient texts.  Well, if you're in interested in what linguistics is all about just keep following those numerous links provided by wikipedia. I hope it will inspire you to develop a keener interest in what linguistics is about, if not to be fascinated enough to become one yourself.  Meanwhile, I'm looking at the topic heading that I put up and sees that it's saying "Linguistic diversity in Thailand"!

What then is the distinction between Austro-Asiatic and Austro-Thai? "Austro" means south, so therefore, Austro-Asiatic is basically South Asia. That is an interesting revelation, because only a small group of people are left that speak Austro-Asiatic (Munda) in India which geographically is considered South Asia. Instead, the language of the Indians are mainly of the Indo-European and Dravidian language groups. Another quirk of linguistics.

The grouping of the language family of Austro-Tai is based on a hypothesis that the Tai-Kadai and Austronesian language families of southern China and the Pacific are genealogically related. There are a number of possible cognates in the core vocabulary.  The word for rice, for example.

While what is seen on the surface is that the Thai language is THE one and only official language of Thailand, in reality a multitude of languages and dialects are spoken in Thailand. I enjoy being able to point out the differences of Isaan dialects spoken in Northeastern Thailand. Sakon Nakhon, where my family is from, has a special kind of sing song lilt (influenced by Puthai) that in my opinion makes it sound softer than for example the dialect of its neighboring province of Kalasin. Nobody will deny that the dialect of the North is different from the dialect of the Northeast, even if we can quite easily understand each other, but have a Southerner speak his dialect to me and I'm lost, but not as lost as having a Karen hilltribe speak to me.

The book, "Linguistic Diversity and National Unity", by William A. Smalley (1994), singularizes the success of Thailand's official language policy. Unlike other multi-ethnic nations, such as Myanmar and India, where official language policy has sparked bloody clashes, Thailand has maintained relative stability despite its eighty languages. 

Another notch on the belt for Thailand, it seems.

IPad moves us forward

I was skeptical, at the beginning, whether I could adapt and actually enjoy reading on a touch screen tablet...until the iPad officially hit the Mexican market. My family and I turned out to be among the first to check it out at Reforma 222's iShop. The main reason for scuttling across the city to hunt for and happily dishing out 8,000 pesos for the smallest 16G-wifi iPad, which was selling like hot cakes that first week, was justified with the thought of all the savings I would receive from not having to pay the average 20 dollars for shipping that always topped each order of books I made with Amazon. (English language bookshops being a rarity in Mexico.) The various Mexican stores that were carrying the iPads all offered the increased incentive of long-term payments, interest free, from 6-18 months. 

It's been about three weeks now and I'm still being surprised on a daily basis, by how I can adapt the iPad to helping me better enjoy the things I like.  Primarily, the adjustment to reading ebooks came pretty easily. Not only do I agree with a Macworld's writer account of "How the IPad changed my reading habits": yes, to the liberating experience of being able to control font size; yes, to the mobility of carrying several 'books' with you in one package; YES, to going back to reading comics again, and finally-yes, to a totally new way of reading magazines and news. I managed to read a novel more leisurely with the bookmark function, and the temptation to look at the final pages is somehow removed by this less physcial format. While reading Chris Kuzneki's The Lost Throne, his descriptions of fabulous places like   Meteora and Mt. Athos, had me checking them out immediately online, just a click away on the iPad.

I also discovered the pleasures of being rewarded by the creative powers of application makers. By asking google to deliver the lastest news related to the iPad, I caught Flipboard on its launching day. What a novel way of experiencing Facebook and Twitter it was! I'm actually using my Twitter account more because of Flipboard. I even like the way Wired is presented on Flipboard more than on its original, too fancy, Wired app. It's a genius of having many options put into one place. I deleted some newspaper apps that I felt were cluttering my opening screen and opted for Flipnews instead. The coolest is being able to use the iPad as a really expensive photo frame that I can switch on as I listen to music from iTunes (which never really caught up with me until now). Apart from the app Photo Frame Lite which delivers me interesting and recently loaded photos from Flickr, I can watch stream of photos shared by my social groups from Facebook, Twitter, and other Flip items I've chosen on Flipboard in its 'unopened' flip screen. Just these photo streams alone make me feel more connected with the world, and with absolutely no regrets that I didn't hesitate to buy this new tech gadget. I am offered glimpses into the beautiful lives, the so talented eyes of a larger bit of humanity than I could possibly experience personally.

The iPad is much more than an oversized iPod, and much more than a common e-reader. The apps Virtuoso, Note Goal Lite, and Etude is encouraging me to try learning how to play the piano again. I doodle on Draw Free when I'm bored. I'm expecting the acquisition of my Spanish vocabulary to speed up with Spanish Dict's word game, my grammar to improve with free spanish lessons podcasts, my ability to manage the complexity of the language by internalizing the downloaded audiobook, Don Quixote.

All in all, I can't help sympathizing with the angst of the publishing industry in their scramble to figure out how to keep in the game in a digitized world. However, at the same time, I can't help cheering all these new game changing paradigm, when I read articles about learning disabled kids and old people coming out enchanted and having a richer learning experience, all thanks to the iPad, ....and all the industrious people creating fabulous apps!