Totally gripping first-person account from the tsunami. This is only one of hundreds of thousands of stories...
Hello sarah,I've been getting literally hundreds of emails from people asking me and about my experience during the Indian Ocean tsunami. Long story short, lucky to be alive. I've been evaced to Male, after the experience...Here's my account:
[BitTorrent inventor, Bram] Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with "content people" from the record and movie industries, he realized that "the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate."Cohen said as much at the conference's panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen's audacity.Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent Effect
Poignant Washington Post story about an (initially undiagnosed) autistic Japanese boy, sent to the US at 15, who is returning to Japan at age 31 because his student visa has run out. Chris managed to control his autism to the point where he was able to live on his own, but being thrown back into Japan, without Japanese language skills, I think will be really challenging for an autistic person.
Tadakatsu Takaishi, as he was known then, came to the United States from Japan in 1989, a 15-year-old boy sent to military school by parents who thought he simply lacked discipline. In fact, those who know him say now, he had autism. Takaishi proved a survivor, learning English, eventually earning a college degree and finding a job in Bethesda.
He built a life, and at its center was Herb Stutts, a longtime American University dean who treated Takaishi like a son. Then this year, Takaishi's student visa ran out, and though everyone who knew him tried, he was not allowed to stay. So came his toughest lesson: Sometimes, hard work doesn't change things.
Tomorrow, after one last holiday with the Stutts family, Takaishi plans to leave his American life as it began, aboard a plane, bound for an uncertain future.
Then later in the article:
Takaishi's parents, who live outside Tokyo, did not attend his graduation from Montgomery College, nor from the University of Maryland system. Takaishi's father and sister traveled to the United States in 2000, but Stutts did not meet them. The family does not speak English and communicates with Stutts through a neighbor in Japan whom Chris recommended, Jimmy Abe.
With Abe acting as interpreter, Chris's father, Matafumi Takaishi, said yesterday that he now realizes Chris has had a developmental disability since childhood. "Now [Chris] is an adult, and we are leaving up to him to make his own decisions," he said.
The Takaishi family, Abe explained, is well-known in Japan, and as their only son, "Chris has to be a success." He was sent away, Abe said, "to become strong and to break up his so-called shyness." To support him, the family has spent the equivalent of $40,000 a year.
There's a lot of sadness in this story. It's sad that his parents didn't diagnose the autism as a child. It's sad that they sent him away to the US in order that they did not have to deal with him. It's sad that he has to return to a Japan that he doesn't know or understand because his visa ran out. It's sad that the parents only think about how much they have spent on him, not the quality of the parenting. It's sad that his "adopted" American parents were much better parents to him than his Japanese parents.
Good luck Chris.
Farewell to a Life: After 15 Years, Autistic Man Must Return to an Unfamiliar Homeland
My friend JJ captured a Christmas ad for the Japanese DVD release of "The Passion of the Christ."
Too weird. (warning, could be offensive to anyone with any sense of religious respect)
Christmas in Tokyo [jdesign.com]
I am still stunned by this natural disaster and hope for the best for all who are affected.
More info on the earthquake and resulting tsunami is here:
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake [wikipedia.org]
and first-hand photos of the disaster in Thailand are here:\
Phuket Tsunami photo gallery by Hellmut Issels [pbase.com]
Jason has a great list of fascinating non-fiction written in 2004. I don't know if it is good or bad that I have read most/all of them already :)
Clay Shirky touches upon everyone's favorite photo-sharing application, flickr.
More importantly for social software generally, both the Flickr API and the inclusion of del.icio.us-style tags have turned Flickr into a service as well as a site....this is the ur-message of Flickr use at ITP — this is what web services looks like when it’s not “Web Services.” No SOAP, no UDDI, no BPML4WS, just good old REST-alicious modeling of resources, and an adopting population that wants to get things done.
Susan Mernit blogs Mark Pesce's powerful essay on BitTorrent and why Hollywood was stupid to shut down the torrent sites.
Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you'll never, ever be able to defeat.In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that's already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.
I'm convinced that the copyright holders who make up the bulk of the MPAA/RIAA membership don't care or don't understand that by attack the "pirates" they only drive them underground or forces them to develop new tools/platforms.
Eric Peterson (Jupiter Research analyst) blogs about meeting Mark Fletcher of Bloglines (the best RSS reader/service out there) and what Fletcher said was Bloglines' business model. Anyone who is in the RSS-space is thinking about this as advertising in RSS is increasingly important. I personally won't be adding any ads to my feed (and I don't have any ads on my blog) but I can see how, for people who have a lot of traffic, it is critical to offset bandwidth, much less other costs.
The essence of his answer is "AdWords on Steroids" (my translation, appropriate given their proximity to the BALCO scandal in Northern California). The idea that any article or feed I'm interested in will be littered with content that can be mined and transformed into relevant pay-per-click advertising. Mark's point was that while Google and Overture sell advertising based on a limited number of keywords, the content in feeds is rich with information that can be mined to laser-target the advertising.
He commented that the aggregate of subscriptions could also be mined to provide additional inventory, e.g., if I subscribe to Engadget and Gizmodo there is A) a strong chance I am a personal technology person and B) I am probably subscribed to other blogs that are gadget-relevant. These additional blogs would then be candidates for gadget ad inventory, QED.
Masahiko Satoh goes into a lot of detail (in Japanese) to explain what Technorati is, and how it works as a service. If you read Japanese and would like to know more about Technorati, please read Masahiko's blog entry.
Salon plants a big wet kiss on Flickr. Katherine's written better stuff than this. I like Salon and I like Flickr, but there could have been a bit more... I dunno, more news in the story?
Here's another reason to appreciate the ruthless nature of Michael Eisner.
"We're seeing executives begin to show quiet leadership, a 'we're all in this together' attitude," Mr. McGurn [special counsel at Institutional Shareholder Services, a group that monitors corporate boards] said. "It's not what we used to see."Particularly galling, Mr. McGurn said, was Mr. Eisner's testimony regarding an interview by Larry King in 1996 on his CNN talk show, when Mr. Eisner told Mr. King that he would hire Mr. Ovitz again if given the opportunity. In truth, Mr. Eisner was then asking Mr. Ovitz to try to get a job at the Sony Corporation.
"That's something there is zero tolerance for today," Mr. McGurn said. "To be presented with a question and you point-blank lie, that's a kiss of death." (During the trial, Mr. Eisner said he regretted his remarks. He was hoping that Sony would buy out Mr. Ovitz's contract.)
After the Ovitz Trial: Ushering in a New Era of Humility in Hollywood [nytimes.com]
Nothing surprising here, but it is good to remind the Japanese as well as the non-Japanese what a male-dominant society Japan is, especially with respect to business. It's great to profile the two Japanese women who sit on boards of directors of companies in Japan, but it's glaringly sad that there are only 2. Here is another chicken/egg problem; without more female role-models, there's little chance for more women to want those positions.
A survey released in October by Corporate Women Directors International, a U.S. nonprofit organization that promotes the participation of women on global boards, found Japan ranked at the bottom of the list among nations with female board representation at Fortune Global 200 companies.
The survey mentioned a third woman board member at Nippon Life Insurance Co. But Shigemi Kanamori, whose name sounds female, turned out to be a man. That translates to less than 1 percent representation.
The United States led the list with 17.5 percent of board seats held by women. All 78 U.S. companies in the Global 200 have at least one female board member, led by grocery store chain Albertson's Inc. with 50 percent female representation.
Japan Corporations Lag in Promoting Women [news.yahoo.com]
Tyler Cowen links us to a long SF Gate article on Japan and electronics.
It is obvious to anyone who visits Japan that the electronics market is very different here. Sure space is an issue, but there's more than that.
ASIAN POP The Gadget Gap / Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?
via
Marginal Revolution: Space matters: why new gadgets come from Asia
I'll write more about this in a minute, but please check Joi's and Dave's blog for details on what I've been up to for the past few weeks. Lots of big changes in my life, but I'm excited for all of them :)
Joi Ito's Web: Technorati Japan
and
Sifry's Alerts: Technorati Goes International with Japan's Digital Garage
Yahoo!掲示板: 4819(デジタルガレージ) (Yahoo! Japan Finance bulletin boad for Digital Garage)
This is not surprising, as the Japanese (as a whole) have always romanticized the West, but it is telling.
More than a 100 [Japanese] expatriates a year are sinking into a state called "the Paris syndrome" which is characterised by feelings of persecution or suicidal tendencies, according to the mental health facilities of city hospitals, according to a study in the Liberation newspaper said.
Part of their clinical depression stems from having to reconcile their romanticism about Paris with reality, psychiatrists said.
"Magazines are fuelling fantasies with the Japanese, who think there are models everywhere and the women dress entirely in (Louis) Vuitton," Mario Renoux, the head of a French Japanese Society for Medecine was quoted as saying. After a relatively short period of only three months or so, Japanese immigrants expecting to find a haven of civilisation and elegance instead discover a tougher existence with many problems dealing with the French.
I've personally seen this in Japan with "Sex and the City." There's a whole cohort of women who want to move to NYC to live life like those women in that TV show. It's frankly astoundingly naiive to think that life in NYC is anything like what is depicted on that show. Just wait until they get to Manhattan and find out that a 6-figure salary barely gets you a 1 BR apt in Chelsea, let alone a closet full of Manolos.
Paris is the City of Blight for culture-shocked Japanese [news.yahoo.com]
The best weblog reader/aggregator has launched in many new languages, but most importantly in Japanese.
MovableType has the distinction of being the premier weblog application, but also has the same distinction of thus being the main target of comment spammers.
I get a LOT of comment spam every day. Most of it is handled by MT-Blacklist, but I am VERY HAPPY to see SixApart working to make further changes to the application architecture. Comments are critical to weblogs, but there are many, many websites that have been destroyed by comment spam.
TypeKey is not, for me, a valid solution. Just today, I tried to log in to TypeKey and the server wasn't responding. That's not a solution that we can count on.
Gwen Stefani's new album has a lovesong to the girls of Harajuku.
Love. Angel. Music. Baby. is very nearly a theme album about Harajuku girls, the wacky teenage fashion plates who parade through Tokyo's Harajuku shopping district wearing pink earmuffs, Minnie Mouse hairstyles, and skirts made out of neckties. Stefani has called these girls her muses, and they crop up everywhere, flanking the singer on her album cover, rescuing her from drowning in the "What You Waiting For?" video, and starring in several songs, notably "Harajuku Girls," the most extravagant piece of musical Orientalism this side of The Mikado. "Harajuku girls, I am your biggest fan," Stefani exults. "Your accessories are dead-on. ... Your underground culture, visual grammar, the language of your clothing is something to encounter."
Gwen Stefani: Could the charming, hyperactive kook really be our new pop queen? [slate.msn.com]
also check out the lyrics:
Adriaan has a great post about the future of the weblog API. However, I'm more moved by his commentary on tags for media (i.e. tags instead of categories a la del.icio.us or flickr.) I look forward to seeing what new apps will take off with the understanding that tags along with syndication create new media.
Head-fi member "mavis" reviews the new Sony NW-HD3 with MP3 support.
Survey says?
I will say this though - if there was a way I could return this thing, I'd do it in a second, and I'd use the money to buy an amp for my iPod - I like the size of the HD3 and I'm looking forward to the good battery life, but there are so many little things which I find EXTREMELY annoying, I'd rather have the iPod with its anemic bass at this point.Doh!
Sony NW-HD3 (full review) [head-fi.org]
This meme just won't quit.
With its films and cartoons drawing strong followings abroad, Japan should promote its "Gross National Cool" as a tool of foreign policy, experts advised Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.But the country also needs to help young people to better understand their own language and culture so they can promote Japanese thinking abroad, the Japan Forum on International Relations said in a report.
It's great that Japan is realizing that it's media is valuable. But the reaction of that Japanese anime company to attack the fansubtitlers is wrong. They should be working to release those anime to a global audience simultaneously, instead of releasing DVDs years later. The demand is global.
Japan advised to promote "Gross National Cool" as foreign policy [news.yahoo.com]
also
CNet does a special report on Japan's electronics industry. The main themes are "Cool Japan" (yet again) and how new alliances are breaking down the "keiretsu" factor (i.e. Samsung supplying Sony with TV panels.) There's also random photos of Tokyo for some strange reason. I haven't read it yet.
Japan's sun rises again | CNET News.com
PDF download also available.
Japanese lawfirms are finally getting around to issuing threatening letters to anime fansub torrent portals. This is a sign that Japanese content companies are not looking to expand their markets so much as they want to "limit losses." If the content providers re-imagined their markets as global instead of just national, and provided the desired content at the same time in multiple formats and multiple languages, they'd see how large of a market they really have. In addition to the stupidity of suing one's own customers, there is the fact that fansub groups will go underground, to encrypted darknets, which won't ever see the light of a portal website, let alone a torrent aggregator like Suprnova.
The demand is real. It is global. Too bad these companies don't seem to care about the non-Japanese fans.
AnimeSuki is a website that aims to be a portal for finding all unlicensed English anime torrents. By limiting the content to only unlicensed anime, we had tried to avoid associating AnimeSuki with piracy, even though as stated on the Licensed Anime page, fansubs are technically a violation of copyright. By not listing licensed anime, AnimeSuki avoided getting into any legal trouble with US anime companies, simply because we don't list anything they hold the copyright of. ... Unfortunately, it seems times have changed. On December 7, 2004 AnimeSuki received an email from a Tokyo law firm who represents the interests of Media Factory Inc. (a Japanese anime studio) requesting us to stop uploading "works" (anime series) of MFI to our website and/or stop "inducing" our visitors to websites where their "works" can be downloaded.Removal of Media Factory Inc. Works [animesuki.com]
Ilford is giving away a free Marilyn Monroe calendar.
The catch is that you have to print it yourself.
Enjoy.
Dawn Summers posts her perspective on the recent B line subway fire in New York. This is a great example of citizen journalism that is enabled by weblogs.
After ten minutes the conductor came back on.
“Umm, ladies and gentleman please remain calm.”
Oh my God.
“There is a fire up ahead. The fire department has arrived, but we cannot proceed. Please remain calm.”
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.
No one in the car said anything – well, nothing that I could print anyway.
Sometimes the negatives of Japan can blind those of us who live here to the positives.
20 years in Japan! I haven't even been here 2 years...
More investments in the weblog world...
“Feedster is currently funded by seasoned Internet experts including members of the New York Angels. We view the investment from Omidyar Network as further validation of our strategy and methodology for growing the business,” said Scott Rafer, CEO, Feedster.Feedster Becomes Omidyar Network Partner“We recognize that Feedster is fulfilling a need in the marketplace by delivering more relevant information from individual commentary, blogs, and edited news sources,” said Doug Solomon, Vice President, Investments, Omidyar Network. “By leveling the playing field between consumers, web services developers, traditional media publishers and organizations, Feedster enables the public to create a richer, more diverse and connected exchange of information.”
Japanese artist, Aya Kato, was featured on Boing Boing and is quite talented.
When you merge remote-controlled model airplanes and digital cameras, you get incredible perspectives like these:
RC Groups Discussion - General Aircraft Topics - Aerial Photography - 2005 Calendar Entries
Nothing extra-ordinary here but it's good to check the big list every now and then.
Alexa Top Japanese Language Sites The Alexa Top 25 Japanese SitesThe Top 25 Japanese language sites, as measured by the number of users visiting the site.
1.Yahoo! JAPAN
2.google.co.jp
3.BIGLOBE
4.geocities.co.jp
5.2ch.net
6.geocities.jp
7.COOLオンライン
8.NIKKEI NET
9.hangame.co.jp
10.FC2WEB
11.dmm.co.jp
12.asahi.com
13.Infoseek Japan
14.time.gr.jp
15.home.ne.jp
16.So-net
17.Www6.plala.or.jp
18.MSN-Mainichi Interactive
19.楽天市場
20.msn.co.jp
21.goo
22.Livedoor
23.Amazon.co.jp
24.@nifty
25.Excite
