Because of general interest and possible further benefits to students and young scholars in China, Tsinghua University Press decided to publish a collection of my articles on ScienceNet for the past two years (2007 – 2009). Both the English texts and their Chinese translation will be printed side-by-side to provide aids to language learning. Publication date is scheduled for November 15, 2009. Here is the cover of the book and my preface.
PREFACE
In the Spring of 2007, at the invitation of Editor-in-Chief of ScienceNet China, Zhao Yan, I started blogging on ScienceNet.cn. To my surprise, the reception of my English language blog articles was very enthusiastic. Over a period of 24 months (to April 2009) I wrote a total of 245 articles and had a visit count of over 880,000. Average readership per article was 1500. Young scientists and university students to whom articles my blog was mostly aimed find the articles particularly beneficial. As a result people suggested that a collection of my articles be assembled and published as a book so that more persons can have access to them more conveniently. Tsinghua University Press agreed to undertake the publication. And ScienceNet China agreed to translate all articles into Chinese and print the translation side-by-side with the original English text. This way, readers can also use this as aids to English learning. This book is a result of such considerations.
There are two main purposes of my writing the blog articles: 1. To record my 47 years of experience in education and research for the benefit of young scholars, 2. To write about life in these United States from my over half century of living here. I mentioned these as well as my background in my first blog article and subsequently. See
Introduction and my first blog
开博一年了
Chinese Americans in the US (#3) – the 1.5th Generation
开博到一段落
Blog articles are to be distinguished from formal writings in a textbook or research monograph. They are more like a personal diary, not formal, and more stream-of- consciousness thoughts. Ninety-nine % of my articles are written in English which has now become my first language. The articles are mainly divided into three groups: 1. Education and research, 2. Life in the US, and 3. Comments on current affairs. Some of the articles in the third category are not relevant due to the passage of time. A very small percentage of the articles are transcribed from other sources such as the New York Times and by other authors. They were posted originally on my blog with attribution since I thought they were timely, well written, and have some points to make. For timeliness and copyright reasons, these were omitted from this collection. Similarly, only selected comments and responses of my blog articles were included. Also except for correcting typos and minor editing, the articles were printed here as is. And the readers can always find everything on sciencenet.cn/blog. There is no attempt to hide anything.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my wife and family for giving up their share of my time and their support so that I can write these blog article; my good friends, Drs Song Jian and Guo Lei for writing introductions to this book; Tsinghua University and my colleague there, Professor Guan Xiao Hong for making the publication of this book possible; and the support of all ScienceNet readers over the past two years. The Chinese translation of the articles were done by the able editorial staff of ScienceNet under the leadership of Ms He Jiao . She can in fact be considered as the co-authors of this volume.
Yu-Chi Ho
April 25, 2009
Lexington, MA, USA
Note added 11/06/.09 I would also like to acknowledge the untiring and meticulous editing work of Ms Yiling Wang of the Tsinghua University Press for the past few months in the production of this book.
Yu-Chi Ho
|