the Sam Jackson College Experience

I just wanted to share this little slideshow from the New York Times about Heshun, which has been rated in the past the “most charmful village in China.” It’s definitely very charmful, though the NYT slideshow does not do it justice. Still, it’s fun to see the Times validate the charm of someplace that we visited during our trip to Yunnan.

Click here for the slideshow [photos: Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times]

Here are some of my own photos from Heshun:

Waterway around Heshun village

Public swimming hole next to a village temple

sunset over the rice fields outside Heshun

For more about Yunnan, check out the dispatch I wrote about our Yale-PKU trip to Yunnan Province.

The wonderful* people at www.collegescholarships.org have set up an interesting scholarship that I just have to share. The Twitter 140 Scholarship is short and sweet: All you need to do, in 140 characters or less, is write a Tweet highlighting how we can use Twitter to improve the world.

Here’s my application:

I did put a fair amount of thought into it, but one can only worry so much about something when you’ve only invested 140 characters in it. (In my case, I believe, 139.)

Now, what exactly is the motivation for completing this scholarship? Let us count the ways:

Since Twitter is still such a new medium, we hoped that by creating a scholarship around it we could help encourage further thinking about how to leverage it. That is why we’re giving $1,680.00 to college students who uses Twitter.

• $1,400.00 Winner
• $140.00 First Runner Up
• $140.00 Second Runner Up

If those aren’t 1,680 good reasons to spend a minute and consider writing a scholarship app here, I don’t know what else could convince you. So without more discussion here about Twitter, go ahead and write something!

Requirements:

• Currently attending full-time in post-secondary education; and
• If you win, you must be willing to allow us to list your name, your picture, and your twitter username, and your winning Tweet on CollegeScholarships.org.

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*(Disclaimer: I did apply for the scholarship, but even if I hadn’t, CollegeScholarships.org is run by really nice people, at least as far as I have interacted with them. I wish everyone in the Higher Ed space were as nice! I guess being popular is easier when you give away money, too.)

Hey everyone – as has happened in the past, my site was recently hacked! : (

This doesn’t seem to be the same thing that happened last winter, but is rather just some strange little exploit that allowed someone to insert some evil javascript into some wordpress files. It only affected www.samjackson.org/college, not any other sites of mine. This happened while I was offline in Shanghai,and I fixed it when I returned – however, Google has not yet updated its “unsafe browsing” to remove my site as a risk. Therefore, if you use Firefox or Chrome, you will continue to get warnings. However, there should no longer be any vulnerabilities. Please let me know right away if you see anything amiss – strange ads (shouldn’t be any!) or pop-ups, anything like that. I’ll fix it right away, but I need your help, since I can’t always detect what is going on.

Thank you for your patience, and your understanding. I try to keep the site as safe as possible, but sometimes hackers get the best of me. The internet is a dangerous place. As always, keep your anti-virus software updated and check fo malware regularly.