Selfie Sticks!!!

Hey there it's Adam writing really quickly in a cafe that's closing! Here's some random things that would have been more cohesive if I knew this place closed at 9:30!

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In a group discussion on AI and the future of humanity, one engineering student posited that aliens had visited the Earth and this could be the reason humans evolved. Everyone agreed. All of us Rhodies shot each other glances, unsure of what to do. We thought about engaging, but didn't.

After the formal discussion was where the conversation really got good, as Josh and I got to talking with some students about the firewall and sex education in China. About the firewall: one student revealed that elite universities in China actually have more access to the internet than the average Chinese. At our current host institution, students can get onto Google and the sites it owns without any problem. At Peking University, they hear, you can even get onto Facebook and Twitter. One student's theory was that the government restricts the internet to protect the less-educated people of China, who might read spurious things online and rebel against the government. By getting into an elite university, students demonstrate their intellectual maturity, which gives them the right to greater access.

About sexual education: one student in our conversation had gotten some in school, the other hadn't. The student who had described it as a handful of documentaries they watched in middle school while split into gender groups, with some vague references to AIDS in a high school psychology class. The other one said he hadn't heard anything about sex in school, and that sex ed was considered outside the purview of the school. Both agreed that sex outside of marriage is considered morally wrong, or at least it used to be, and they claimed this prevents a lot of it from happening.

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Shanghai has 25 million people in it. This is double the population of my home state of Ohio, plus a couple million more.

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Today's conference/exchange with Shanghai Jiao Tung ended with a dumpling-making session with our host students. There was a cheer as we got a selfie stick out. I'll upload the picture as soon as I get more wifi.

-Adam