Some thoughts on when to change air filters

So we all know that Beijing has notoriously bad air pollution, specifically of the small so-called pm2.5 variation. 

As a result, air purifiers are all the rage in this city. But I have a question: how do you know when you need to replace your air Purifier's filter? 

Here is a striking example: the air output of this taobao-bought air purifier is just as bad as untreated air. You might also be able to see that the filter inside is darkened and grey. 

As a comparison, check out the same model, but with a clean filter here:

Pretty big difference huh? Time to change filters!!

Xiaomi's new heart-monitoring band: not a fitbit-killer

Hot off the presses from China's biggest shopping day of the year: I present, a brand-new, just released Xiaomi Band with Heart Rate. It just went on sale on 11/11 at 0:00 midnight, and arrived in my hands at 9:15 AM. 

It is now 10:25 AM as I write this. 

The good: it looks exactly the same and functions very similarly to how the old band did. My expectation is that battery life will be similar. Cheap at 99 RMB = $15 USD. 

The bad: it doesn't do continuous heartrate monitoring, so I will still wear my fitbit charge HR on my left arm, and a xiaomi band on my right.

On learning English

I've been fascinated with language and learning it since my youth when I had to learn to survive in an environment which wasn't in my then "native" language. For a bit of background, my "mother" tongue is Mandarin Chinese, and I am most fluent (by far) in American English.

I am by no means a language expert, but I've always found that learning language is a really interesting process from an intellectual standpoint. There's something about acquiring a language and making progress through slow incremental steps, and then all of a sudden -- BAM! -- and things start making more sense.

Since I've been in China for about 1.5 years now, I have come across some observations regarding learning and using language in a foreign language environment. Let me try to go through a couple of them:

• When speaking to non-native speakers of a language, watch your use of vocabulary and speed of speech. When I first got to Beijing, I understood maybe 20-30% of what people said. It was kind of magical because I would never get distracted from studying the street scene, but it didn't work too well at work because ...well, because it was a lot harder to get things done. Today, my comprehension level has improved markedly, and I'm at about 70-80% of comprehension in Beijing when I'm concentrating. When I'm not concentrating (for example if I have my back to a colleague and she makes an out-of-context remark to me), that drops to 20-30%.
  
  I really want to emphasize this to people. In China, people will nod along to whatever English blather you have and pretend to understand everything indefinitely. If you have character and are using interesting idioms, figures of speech, or anything colorful in any sort of way -- expect that your Chinese audience will not understand it. I've dumbed down my vocabulary use in English, and additionally dialed back my speed, and I think people still have a hard time my use of language in English. I also intentionally write emails using simpler vocabulary and less idiomatically than before. Maybe you can see it in my blog. More on this later if I get around to it. 

• "How do you learn English?" For some reason, being a native English language speaker makes you some sort of expert on learning a language. The truth is that being a native language speaker means that you're probably the worst person for teaching someone else to learn your language, because you have no idea how that person should learn, since that learning process is completely different than the way that you (the native speaker) acquired the language.
  
  But! There are some interesting tidbits to take away. The reason I say this is because I am also learning a foreign/second language at the same time. You might have heard of it. It's called Chinese. But you might say, "how is it possible that you need to learn Chinese? Isn't that your mother tongue?" Why yes! It's the first language that I learned to speak and I'm sure I can communicate very well about what kind of toast and cereal I would like, but I sure as heck couldn't (before arriving in Beijing) talk about economics or advertising or technology.
  
  Let me tell you how NOT to learn English: by reading Chinese subtitles on your favorite American TV show / movie. I guarantee you will not learn language quickly like that. Why? Because subtitles (we're wired this way) are addictive. Your eyes will automatically gravitate to whatever familiar text there is on the screen. This is even true for a person whose Chinese reading ability isn't even that great. Having Chinese subtitles and trying to learn English through the spoken dialogue is a futile exercise.
  
  Let's take the opposite case -- for me trying to learn Chinese -- watching a Chinese TV show with Chinese subtitles? That actually might be kind of useful, because you're just getting a  visualization of the spoken language. Speaking of visualizing the spoken language, my Mandarin listening and comprehension has improved markedly in the past 18 months, but my speaking has been lagging pretty far behind. I attribute this to a lack of reading in Chinese. The big problem with learning Chinese is that even though I know what the sounds sound like, I can't visualize the characters, so it makes it much harder to retain a phrase or piece of new vocabulary.
  
  The micro-example of this is for learning people's names in Chinese. I can't retain any of them. Why? Because when someone says "ZhouNan" -- I can't visualize those Chinese characters, and if I can't visualize them, then I have a much harder time retaining them. Even to this day, when I think about my Chinese colleagues' Chinese names, I only know them by pinyin, and not their characters. Sad, I know, but it's the most efficient way for me so far. 

So what does Mr. English teacher Fred have in conclusion today?
1) Speak slower and simpler when speaking to non-native speakers to help them better understand you.
2) Don't use a language that you already know to learn a new second language.
3) Find ways to visualize the sounds: subtitles, books with context, etc.

On filtration: water

How many of you guys filter your water at home? 
If you live in the US, I expect that some of you probably have a Brita or Pur countertop filter sitting around somewhere. If you live in a less well-developed part of the world, then perhaps you have a slightly more robust setup.

The water in Beijing is notorious for being bad. I don't know where I got that idea from, but it seems to be part of my basic understanding that Beijing water is semi-toxic and I need to filter it (and preferably boil it) if I wanted to drink it.

Given that assumption, I set out to try to figure out what water filter setup I should buy.

Reverse osmosis, carbon filters, oh my! 
When I first started down the purchase path of finding a water filter to use in Beijing, I explored all the options on the market -- I looked at pitcher filters like Brita, reverse osmosis setups with "4 filter layers and ultrafine purification" that had to be installed under the sink, and everything in between (like 3M canister filters...etc).

After doing a couple evenings of research and finding the price range on Taobao to vary from super cheap (say, $50 USD) all the way to obscenely expensive ($300 USD), I was thoroughly confused. The problem was this: with air filtration, I have a few different reasonably-priced ways to evaluate whether my filter setup is effectively cleaning my air; with water filtration -- I don't know how I would do that. 

So what did I do? 
I did what any risk-averse, marketing-exposed consumer would do: I bought a brand. Now, you might be thinking that meant something like a well-known US/European brand like 3M or Doulton, but the thing that really turned me off from buying those was that both of those brands are so large as to be at risk of having counterfeit items circulating on a marketplace like Taobao.

Sometimes I'm looking for a knockoff or imitation product: say, for something like a Kindle-case, where "authenticity" isn't all that important. But in the case of something that I'm putting drinking water through, I figured it'd be better to err on the safe side.

Okay - so ... let's pick a brand... that isn't that well known
But has a big enough global brand presence that they wouldn't put their parent brand at risk by producing a sub-par product. It just so happened that one brand fit that description: Unilever. Strangely enough, Unilever doesn't produce a water filter product for any other market, but they have a line of Pureit filters (ranging from installed under-counter, wall-hanging, free-standing...etc) that seemed to fit both my budget and my use case.

So that's why I have a Unilever Pureit water filter.

And yet, I still put it through a Brita and boil it before drinking.

On dry cleaning and O2O

Yesterday was dry cleaning day, which, in almost any other city would mean that I would grab all my dirty clothing to be dry-cleaned, get into my car, and haul it down to the nearest dry-cleaning shop that I could find with horrendous 3-star Yelp reviews, and find a passable coupon that made my whole order of 12 items less than $100 USD.

This being Beijing, China, in the middle of the biggest O2O craze and with a billion "O2O" startups cash-flush with venture funding, I did none of that. I had someone come to my house and pick it all up, or at least I attempted to.

Sidenote: 
What is O2O, for the unacquainted? It stands for "Online to Offline" or vice versa. In essence, it's the idea of taking what was originally a traditional business (say, Dry Cleaning store) and turning it into an online business (say, Dry Cleaning app that calls a guy to haul away your dirty clothing). 

So here's how it's all supposed to work: you grab your favorite dry-cleaning "app" (really, it's an HTML5 app that's hiding inside wechat / AliPay -- I used the AliPay variant, which was not as good a user-experience) and say "I want someone to come pick stuff up!" Then they give you a time range, say "14:00-16:00" and you wait. All good right? Yup! It would be fantastic, except at 15:40, I got a text and call telling me that my pick-up guy wasn't going to make it, and perhaps we could reschedule for 16:00-18:00. As 18:00 ticked around, that became 22:00, and around 21:40, I got a call telling me that they wouldn't be able to make it.

I mean, okay, now I've wasted a perfectly good day waiting for someone to pick up my dry-cleaning. I would call this a dry-cleaning/O2O fail. In the end, we (meaning, my very persuasive girlfriend) convinced the guy to come and pick up our stuff - that's where the fun begins.

1. He can't find where we are
There are plenty of good map tools in China that have good auto-fill description functionality, but as a deliveryman running around with bundles of clothing, I don't think it's something they're actively using. Besides, it was 10pm and I'm sure the poor guy had been at this for hours already (their shift ends at midnight).

He fixed this by calling us and us providing him with a verbal description. Decidedly non-online.

2. There was too much paperwork
You'd think that with such a digital concept, they would have done away with all the paperwork, but nooooo. We still had to write down our information on slips of carbon copy paper to verify that we had given him certain items. I understand why there might be some value in terms of having a record of the transaction, but still - way too much work and unnecessary writing when the app has all the info.

3. Too many promotions 
There were dozens of promotions going on, effectively making the cost of the service something like $2 USD per item. But this also meant a lot of finagling trying to get the right combination of promotions/orders/bags. In the end, the result was quite cheap, but this poor guy was at our doorstep trying to handle all this stuff while his kid was at home waiting for him to get home to have dinner -- at 10pm on a Saturday night. Not great work-life balance.

Anyway - I'm hoping that they'll improve the experience, because with that level of difficulty, it is almost easier to just go to the store with all my dirty clothing...

Silence

Beijing is a really noisy city. 

Cars honk at the mere suggestion that you might be within their path. 

Little 3-wheeled electric bike/delivery units beep while taking over the pedestrian/bike paths. 

Some cyclists like to warn everyone of their presence by constantly ringing their bell. So that way you hear them from a couple hundred feet away. (Experience from this morning no less!) 

Then there's the constant hum of air conditioning at work (too hot at my desk), or the drone of air purifiers taking little particles out of my indoor apartment air. 

It's only on rare clear air days when I turn all my filters off and the refrigerator isn't rumbling, that I get to experience something that we all take for granted: a moment of silence. Otherwise, it always seems like there's someone screaming in your ear (like the overly enthusiastic helpful waiter today) or some car getting ready to cut you off. 

In other air quality news...

New York Times article on China / India Polluttion
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/upshot/the-next-big-climate-question-will-india-follow-china.html?abt=0002&abg=0

You know how I know if it's going to be a good day?

When I wake up, glance at my air quality monitor in my apartment, and see a number like 157 on the readout.

The next thing I do is immediately check the outdoor air quality published by aqicn.org.

Then I open my curtains, and if it's not freezing, my windows.

Thus is the reality of living in Beijing.