Adrift In the Happy Hills

Vancouver Riots and the Era of "facebook Surveillance"

2011-06-19T15:51:00.002+09:00

Wow...almost 10 months since my last post. All my writing energy is going toward my research. Had a short paper published in a major journal in my field this month, and have two more in review.

Anyway, just wanted to say a word about the Vancouver riots following the Canucks-Bruins game. I was disgusted by it. I want to see rioters brought to justice and prosecuted. But beyond the immediate damage to Vancouver, the incident raises some interesting questions about privacy in the digital age.

You've probably heard that many of the rioters have been identified via facebook. In an age where everyone has a camera in their pocket in the form of a cellphone, and where everyone routinely uploads photos and tags faces, it was inevitable that the worst of the rioters would be caught in image form for the world to see. While the riot was originally blamed on a small group of armed thugs prepared to cause trouble before the game even started, facebook photos have shown that most of the rioters were middle class males that just took the opportunity to unleash when it seemed like the regular rules no longer applied.

Websites with pictures of rioters caught in the act have sprung up asking people to anonymously identify their friends, co-workers and acquaintances. Some social media experts have pointed out that while this may be the first time this has been done, it is very unlikely to be the last. We may be entering an era of "mutual surveillance", where everyone is watching everyone else, all the time.

Some people are uneasy about the online lynching taking place before due process or fair trials. Other see facebook and online photos as an emerging weapon of the police state.

The interesting thing to note is that we, the citizens, have become the police state. Orwell envisioned a centralized form of surveillance that only those in power would have the money and infrastructure to make use of, leaving the ordinary person with nowhere to hide. Instead, the cameras are held by all of us.

It should be pointed out that until now, many publicized uses of cameras have been to expose abuses of authorities, not citizens, the first being Rodney King's beating in Los Angeles in the early 90's. The consequence of this is that authorities are every bit as susceptible to surveillance. You can see the ubiquity of photographs and video in the public domain as analogous to the wikileaks philosophy that in a world where nothing is private, those who are the most honest have the most to gain. For example, suppose you are a food company that routinely checks your product for problems, despite the fact your competitors do not. Either you must abandon the practice yourself, or face difficulty in competing them due to the costs they cut by behaving that way. Only if their secrets are brought to light is it possible for you to behave ethically and still survive as a business.

Since the taping is decentralized and distributed amongst the population, it is unlikely it can be stopped at this point. Attempts to prevent it by law run the risk of making things more Orwellian, not less. It should be noted that attempts to curtail public videotaping will likely do more to empower the authorities. When videotaping is challenged legally, it is usually by the police who attempt to cover up abuse by pressing bogus charges on the tapers.

The best possible solution may be to see to it that if public taping and photographing is going to happen at all, legal protections should be put in place to enforce the right of people to do it, to prevent the power from falling on one side. Whether we like it or not, a bargain along the lines of "you show me yours, I'll show you mine" has been forced upon us. And we just have to hope that if we are more ethical, we will have more to benefit from the arrangement.

Beating the Japan Jetlag

2010-08-21T20:19:00.005+09:00

I'm from East coast, which has a time difference from Japan of 12 hours, about as long as you can get before the difference begins to shrink again. The jetlag turns your body upside down. As far as your internal clock is concerned, day becomes night and vice versa.

But strangely, people that make the trip between Japan and the Eastern seaboard often notice that the jetlag coming back from Japan is much worse than the jetlag going to it. I never understood why this was- why is the gap between 11am and 11pm Monday so much harder to deal with than the gap between 11am Monday and 11pm the previous night? But for whatever reason, the qualitative experience is different. Coming to Japan, the day is bright and full when you sense it should be dark. The shining sun and flurry of activity keeps you awake, as much as you wish you could sleep. Coming back, however, the opposite occurs- as night falls, your internal clock rings, and you begin to waken. This can often result in a week or two of bleary eyed insomnia. Its a lot easier to keep a disoriented body awake at "night" than it is to convince it to sleep during the "day".

With time though, I've gotten better and better at beating the return-home jetlag. Here are my tips:

1. If you have a choice, take a red-eye flight

You should probably be doing this anyway, since traveling at night saves you from wasting a day doing it, and extends the real length of your time back. People avoid the red-eye because they hate the idea of staying awake all night. What they don't realize is that as far as their bodies are concerned, they'll be "staying awake at night" for the next few days anyway; all the red eye does is give them a head start on beating the jet lag before they even arrive. Drink lots of coffee before you leave and do what you can to convince your internal clock that its morning as you go. Soon enough, that hour truly will be morning.

2. When you arrive, stay awake for the remaining daylight hours at all costs.

If you've timed it right, it should be close to nightfall as you arrive anyway. But if not, keep awake at all costs- falling asleep during the day will make it very hard to sleep when night comes, undoing all your hard work staying awake during the flight.

Of course, staying awake after you've already been up for 24 hours is easier said than done. The key is activity. Go out with family or close friends who will understand if you're out of it for the first day, and keep talking to fight off the sleep. If you just got back, you should have lots to talk about anyway.

Avoid coffee at this point. Remember- the point is to sleep at night, not just stay awake during the day. You want your body to be at ease and ready for sleep when its time to do it.

3. Take some Melatonin before you go to bed

Melatonin gives your body that woozy, sleepy feeling that comes over you as night approaches. Aside from its obvious use in fighting insomnia, it also helps adjust your body's clock. Its likely one reason you stay awake at night during jet lag is because your body isn't producing enough of it when you need it, so help it along.

If you follow these steps, you should be feeling better by your second day back. Or even your first morning back, if you time the departure time of your flight just right.

2 problems for Japan and a simple solution

2010-08-14T03:36:00.003+09:00

Problem 1:

-Japan owes 200% of its GDP in debt, the highest rate in the first world.

-Japan owes most of its debt domestically- in other words, in yen.

-The Bank of Japan controls the supply of yen. It could print its way out of debt. But normally, this is not done, because it leads to inflation as the money supply increases.

Problem 2:

-The Yen is too high. Japan's economy relies heavily on exports. The lower the value of the yen, the more money it makes selling cars overseas. Therefore, Japan has bought dollars in the past when the US dollar falls, to keep its value high against the yen.

-Right now, the end of the carry trade has made the price of the yen shoot up, making those critical exports less profitable.

Solution to both problems:

Print yen and pay domestic debt with it. Japan's economy is at the 0 bound as it is, with everyone saving. So inflation is not a major threat.

But Japan is now in a very rare situation where any resulting inflation would be a blessing. They could pay off debt and lower the value of the yen all at the same time.

But the bureaucrats in charge just sit there like deer in headlights. It's depressing.

Free society and Free markets don't have to go hand in hand

2010-08-10T04:14:00.005+09:00

In Sweden right now. Stopped in Beijing on the way. It was an interesting experience, and I thought I should write something about it, as much commentary about China circulating as there already is.

China recently passed Japan as the second largest economy in the world, and people have been talking about its inevitable rise to the status of an economic superpower for years now. But it wasn't until I saw one of their major cities entering this new era that the reality of it really hit me. I've been to a number of second world countries that were supposedly on the verge of breaking through with a booming modern economy, only to be held back by the usual string of corruption, nepotism and political instability. But China already seems to have crossed a critical threshold. They may be fudging the numbers, and they may be experiencing a bubble and see a crash, but even with those things considered, its clear that China will have major influence in the world our children grow up in.

It's important to remember that for all the cell phones and sodas you see there now, China is not a free society. The government is not democratically elected, and they will disappear anyone that threatens them. They censor the internet. They forbid discussion of politics. In these respects, they are everything that the western world, particularly the United States, has prided itself in not being.

This is an interesting turn of events, because throughout the second half of the 20th century, the struggle between capitalism and communism was framed as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was billed as a triumph of freedom. But what it really was was a triumph of capitalism. Regardless of what anyone may have thought about the US, their economic system had indisputably generated more wealth than either China or the USSR could manage playing by their own sets of rules. Philosophical debates over how a government should try to provide for people aside, it had become hard to argue that East Germany was better off than West Germany by any practical measure.

The point is, wealth plays a large role in determining how happy people are with a state. In government simulations, it is wealth (more specifically, food) that plays the key role in whether or not the North Korean military will remain loyal to Kim Jong Il, or if they will finally overthrow him. Depressions are a threat to whoever is in office, but people tend to be much more forgiving if they are doing well. Free speech is a noble thing to yearn for, but it takes backseat to feeding your children on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Totalitarianism looked pretty bad when it couldn't deliver. In previous decades it seemed just that such states were unable to keep themselves from collapsing economically. When the USSR fell, it felt like Karma for its misguided ideals.

But what happens when totalitarianism makes one exception by easing up on control of the free markets, and lets everybody have a cell phone? What happens when you can get a good job in an otherwise totalitarian state, and buy a nice car?

Already, some American conservatives are starting to look toward China approvingly. One blogger I know noted with admiration how when China needed to build its Olympic stadiums, it just razed the houses in the way, without the years of paperwork, payouts and BS bureaucratic hassle that it would have taken in the states. Another liked the way Chinese police dealt with an emotionally distraught man who took a hostage. They just shot him in the back of the head, without trying to talk him down or worrying about any of that due process crap. Its sad, because now that China is poised to not only rival but eventually even surpass the US economically, those policies are the only thing that distinguish the US from China.

And its going to be a lot harder to preserve those ideals this century. Because unlike in the last one, we won't have all the cars, electronics, Big Macs and sodas to persuade people they're worth fighting for. Because all of those things are now already available in, if not made, in China.

The Status Trap

2010-06-05T09:07:00.003+09:00

Been busy lately...lot's to do at work, and I spend all my free time either reading stuff in my field or doing research. Submitted a paper to a pretty high-ranking journal in my field, with the help of someone with some math and programming skills. The paper has passed by 3 of 6 possible phases of rejection. Now its just hanging in limbo, past the date feedback from peer reviewers should have come back (though I hear slow replies are normal at a lot of places). The journal has a 95% rejection rate, so we'll see...it answers the questions it sets out to pretty thoroughly, so even if its turned down, I think it'll find a home somewhere eventually.

But anyway, took some time off to just surf the net again, and came across a really interesting article on the link between self-esteem and perceived social status, not just in terms of your income, but in terms of your standing with your friends and at your job.

It's an interesting theory. This paradigm actually accounts for a lot of common, everyday behaviors that I never thought had a satisfactory explanation. We see office politics over meaningless little things all the time. These behaviors get dismissed as "petty", even though all but the best of us tend to get caught up with them at some point. This actually offers a rational explanation as to why that would be, rather than just shrugging the phenomenon off, as it usually is. It's one of those elephants in the room of human behavior, all around us, but almost never acknowledged.

The article mentions competing with yourself, and comparing yourself to where you were a few years ago, as a way of staying out of status games with people around you. I have another strategy for staying out of the "status trap"- put your focus into being capable as someone in your field, not just as someone who's capable in his/her immediate surroundings. If you focus on your own workplace, it can lead to competing with people around you. But if you focus on developing your skills to be competitive anywhere, it can lead to partnering with the people around you to become better as a group, and better teamwork.

What is g?

2010-03-28T18:58:00.004+09:00

"Too long, likely won't read" summary: this is an explanation about how the concept of general intelligence, or IQ, is justified statistically, and some general criticisms about it. Tried to keep it simple, but that means keeping it long.

Took a class in multivariate statistics this spring. Among other things we learned about Principal Components Analysis and Factor Analysis, a family of procedures invented by the psychometrician Charles Spearman at the turn of the last century for the express purpose of studying intelligence. In fact the entire concept of "general intelligence", or g, is essentially founded in factor analysis.

Today, PCA and Factor Analysis have all kinds of applications that reach beyond justifications for IQ tests and conservative policies. But learning about it even in a general sense demystified what IQ is to me to some extent, and I wanted to share.

A few disclaimers- I am by no means an expert in factor analysis, and even what I know will be simplified for the sake of getting the general point across without getting mired in technical details. If you want a more involved explanation, check out this blog post by an academic at University of Michigan, and if you want to get down to the linear equations and matrix algrebra, get my teachers' text, which is apparently as loathed by past students reviewing it on amazon as it is thorough.

I was talking about with a friend today and realized you need to go back to ground 0 to really explain this to everybody, so I'll start with the basic-basics, correlation. You did it in 9th grade. Y is a vertical line, x is a horizonal one. On the horizontal axis, you might have an independent predictor variable, like the $ amount of money you sink into a theme park. On the vertical Y axis you have your dependent variable, say number of visitors to the theme park. If money spent on theme parks increases visitors, you should see a linear relationship, and a diagonal line at a 45 degree angle on the graph: for every buck you spend, one more visitor comes, etc. This would be a correlation of 1. No relationship whatsoever gives you a correlation of 0. A perfect negative relationship (each dollar spent repels an existing visitor from the park) is negative 1.

In real life, of course, the relationships are rarely this clear-cut. If you have a perfect relationship of 1, its almost certainly just because you screwed up your data and just have two different looking measures of the thing (toe size in shoes increases with shoe size, for example). In real life, even .8 is a great correlation. Even .4 can be important, though on the graph it just looks like a smear of data points angled in a general upward direction to the naked eye.

It was observed by Spearman (you can read the original paper here) that all school tests tend to correlate, geology with math, art with history, German with geology. (I see this myself: at work we look for tests that correlate with the TOEIC Bridge, a test of ability in English language. As it is, everything correlates with it, including scores on math tests).

Spearman developed a technique for studying these intercorrlelations between multitudes of tests, which begat Principal Components Analysis and later Factor Analysis.

A brief segway to explain the process: To put it as simply as I can, these procedures group things that correlate with one another together. As an example, suppose you gave people a survey about things they liked to do. Half the activities mentioned on it were things like going out to meet friends, meeting new people, etc, and half were stuff like staying home and reading a book.

You might find that the activities that involved going out and meeting new people tended to correlate with one another, and the activities that involved being alone tended to correlate with one another. Looking at how people answer these questions about activities, you might see 2 "factors" emerge: an extroversion factor, made up of the going out questions, which correlate with one another highly, and an introversion factor, of activities that involve being alone (come to think of it, you might just find that these two personalities made up polar opposites of just one big factor...but you get my drift).

Anyway: Factor Analysis is quite good at isolating groups of questions/tests etc that are correlated with one another (Group A, math problems), and therefore share some kind of relation, with groups of unrelated questions that also correlate well with one another (Group B: questions designed to measure love of food) but do not correlate with the questions in group A (because you can love food and hate math, love math and food, love math and be skinny and not care about food, etc etc. No correlation).

However, as I said, all those school tests do tend to correlate, even, say, English and science, which you would think would be pretty different.

People I talk to object to this idea. Surely, there are great writers that just don't get science and vice versa, right? Well, yes and no. And in the long run, more or less just no. We tend to look at extremes and exceptions, but as a general rule, a kid who's a great writer will tend to be not too shabby in math class either, even if he won't be the next Einstein. And the math nerd will probably be an at least competent writer, even if he never becomes Shakespeare. And conversely, to hold down the other end of the correlation, there are plenty of people that won't be particularly great at either of those subjects, too.

Spearman found one big factor that accounted for most of the variance, which came to be known as g, or general intelligence. Spearman posited that much in the same way all those intercorrelated questions about going out and meeting people represent an "extroversion" factor, the big factor of intercorrelations between various mental tests represented "general intelligence", in other words, how smart you supposedly are. The variance unique to each test that couldn't be explained by the first big general factor was presumed to be unique to each test, but what could be explained by that first factor was "general intelligence": a general tendency to succeed on paper and pencil and paper tests.

Of course, since then there have been all kinds of alterations, challenges, and more alterations to the theory, and Spearman's original methodology has been tweaked and improved upon in countless ways, with literally thousands of pages written on the subject. And yet, the theory, in essence, remains the same: one general factor accounts for success on more or less any kind of mental test. You might expect that there would be at least, say, two, one for verbal intelligence and one for mathematical intelligence. But no. Quibbling about first and second order factors aside, one essentially describes them all quite well. Tweaking that theory might improve your model fit in Confirmatory Factor Analysis (which I won't get in to here) a bit, but bottom line, one does it.

And so, IQ tests are designed to tap that general factor, that general correlation between any other test you might take. It works as a fairly good predictor of how you'll do on a test of economics, or a flight school exam, or a rock and roll trivia quiz, precisely because its designed to tap that statistical overlap between them.

So the apparently statistically unassailable correlation between IQ tests and other paper and pencil tests did a lot to justify the serious study of IQ. If there are "multiple intelligences", why can't anyone ever find them in factor analysis? At the heart of it, this is the trump card IQ supremacists like to play when they say science is on their side.

And it sounds pretty convincing. But here's the thing: I've spent this spring doing factor analyses and PCA on all kinds of data. Prices of companies on the stock market. Countries' performances on Olympic events. Various brands of cereals.

And nearly all of them can be explained to a fair degree by a large first factor.

Oh yes, I know there are all kinds of qualifications to be made here. Yes, large first factors are more common in PCA, which is now frowned upon for analysis of latent variables. Yes, maximum likelihood extraction will account for less variance (meaning smaller factors, first or otherwise) and explain more of the correlation matrix. Yes, rotations can make large first factors vanish, or at least diminish.

And yet, to only somewhat greater and lesser degrees, those big first factors loom over almost any data you subject to these procedures. In the case of stock prices, it's a "general index factor", meaning the overall health of the stock market (secondary factors are unique to specific industries such as finance, energy, etc). In the case of Olympic decathlons, its "general athletic ability".

The point is, we tend to mystify study of the mind. If we're trying to see something in our heads that can't be seen by the naked eye, say, the inspiration that led the paintings on the Sistine Chapel, we can tend to make out that first factor to be something of striking importance. And in all fairness, it may indeed be a useful method for summarizing our data. But even if it does help guide our understanding of intelligence, let's be clear about what it is, statistically speaking: Its an attempt to organize and explain the data derived from a battery of tests. And when you apply the same logic and reasoning to other things, it suddenly becomes a lot clearer, and a suddenly seems a lot less exciting and insightful.

As an example:

Suppose a small nation is about to enter the olympics for the first time. This hypothetical small nation has 3000 athletes that have only played one sport before now, but they need to pick the top athletes and assign them to different event(say 24).

So this is what they do: they each compete in the 24 sports. Times and scores are recorded, and a factor analysis is performed on the data.

A first factor that explains 45% of the data is derived. This first factor is labelled g.a, general athletic ability. It is the commonality that explains success across the board with all those sports. It correlates well with all those sports because it is, in fact, the creation of those correlations. Each athlete receives a factor score, which shows how highly they load on it.

And you know what? It works quite well, statistically speaking. Want to predict who will do well at javelin throwing? Well, lets look at who loaded highest on that general factor. Hey, he's good!

Want to see who will do well at the 300m swim? Check the factor scores. Not bad!
Since this data seems statistically unassailable, it is decided: athletes with high loading on that factor will get to go to the olympics, participating in randomly selected sports. Because that general factor makes the specific sport irrelevant, you see.

Just one problem: while that factor score may well be a good indicator, statistically, if you want to get someone who's really good at javelin throwing...just look at the javelin throw test you did, and see who threw furthest.

If you really want to see who will do best at the 300m swim...just check the race you held, and look who came in first.

Depressingly often, people that did best in those events may not have even have had extremely high scores for that factor at all.

The same is true of mental tests. If you really, really want to mash together an economics test with a flight test with a rock and roll trivia quiz, you can do it, statistically. But if you want to see who does best at each, that general factor is a poor replacement for the original info. By the same token- the traits that make a good stockbroker really do differ from the traits that make a good scientist, regardless of that overlap.

Everything Old is New Again

2010-03-17T16:49:00.005+09:00

There's an old saying that "people laugh at the fashions and trends of the past, but follow the current ones religiously". I believe it's from the turn of the last century, but over 100 years later its still true. As cool as you think you look now, in the not too distant future, people will look at your picture and roar at the absurdity of your clothing and hairstyle. In ten years, this era, now seen as the cutting edge of cool by the young people living through it, will be universally derided as a fashion abomination, a cultural wasteland from which nothing of value was produced.

There's an interesting exception to this rule, though: When a new past era becomes targeted for derision, the previous "worst decade ever" suddenly experiences a revival in popularity. Today on the train I saw a soda ad that modified the font on the "Fanta" logo to look like the lettering on the name of an '80's hair metal band, with sharp, jagged edges, lightning bolts on either end and a color fade from shocking red to shocking purple. And it occurred to me that the 80's revival in pop culture is well under way. You see it all over the place. Movies based on 80's toys like Transformers are big. High top sneakers with neon laces are cool again. And the trend is all over the charts. Rihanna's Rude Boy video is straight up new wave punk, to choose one of may examples. (many will claim they were into the '80s before it was cool, and its true that some people were really ahead on the trend. But it seems to have hit its peak about now)

The older of us have seen this before. As a kid, I vaguely remember when the 60's was cool. By the time I was in college the movie Dazed and Confused had hit. A few years later That 70's Show was on the air, and it was a full-fledged '70s revival. It was only a matter of time before the 80's -just ten years ago despised as the lamest, tackiest most irredeemably awful decade in history- became the height of fashion.

I had always assumed it was a nostalgia trip; older people trying to relive the glory years of their youth once they get old enough to move into decision making jobs in media and fashion. But it occurs to me that most of the people leading this trend didn't live their adolescence in the 80's...they were born in the 80's, and in most cases are only old enough to remember the trends they're jumping on as vague childhood memories of the customs of older siblings.

While the much older might get a kick out of these revivals, it seems like these comebacks are initiated by the first generation not old enough to realize that that decade isn't supposed to be cool anymore. If that's the case, a 90's revival won't come until the people in their mid-twenties aren't old enough to remember grunge firsthand. Perhaps sometime in the late 2010's?

Whatever happened to Charlie Kaufman?

2010-02-16T15:01:00.008+09:00

I was just watching what might be my favorite movie of all time, Synecdoche New York, which is written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, writer of movies such as Being John Malkovich, the Oscar-winning Adaptation, and the critically beloved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which starred Kate Winslett and Jim Carrey, who worked for a song just so he could say he did a movie with Kaufman.

Going by critical reviews, you might assume Kaufman was doing fine. Roger Ebert named Synecdoche the best movie of the decade, for example, and it make a lot of critics' shortlists for the same spot.

But here's the funny thing- no matter what source you check, it is nearly impossible to find any information on what Kaufman is doing right now, and what, if any, his future projects are. His fan website, BeingCharlieKaufman, mostly just updates to mention critics that have put his movies in "best of the decade" lists.

The disturbing thing is, Synecdoche failed to make any money. IMDB shows it cost 21 million, and only made 3 domestically. There were reports that it failed to find a distributor at Cannes despite its nomination for the Palm d'Or, and that the backers took a loss on it. While a successful screenwriter, Kaufman has said he is not independently wealthy; if he had an even relatively smaller stake in a money-losing 21 million dollar production, he could be in debt for a lot of money.

Now, it would be rash to say Kaufman is in trouble at this point. But its surprising to note that in an age where people in Hollywood literally can't go to a restaurant without it being mentioned online, and where there are entire websites such as IMDB devoted to carefully following the lives of even the most minor writers and directors, there has almost literally not been a word written about Kaufman in about a year now. Not his whereabouts, not his upcoming projects, nothing.

Does anyone have any news on him? What happened?

UPDATE: Kaufman is down but not out! Here's an update from Mick, operator of BeingCharlieKaufman.com:

When Synecdoche came out, Charlie was pretty bummed by the mixed reviews for the film. He said a few times he might quit screenwriting, but since then he has said he's working on something new. One or two other people have told me he's currently working on a new script, too, but I have no idea what it's about or what it's called. No idea when we might get more info about it, either. Sometimes it takes him years to finish a screenplay, so it might be a while before we get more details.

Great to hear. If he quit, it would be a major loss to modern cinema.

Who wants an iPad?

2010-02-01T16:44:00.004+09:00

There had been talk of an apple tablet computer for years, but the actual product was something of a let-down to me. Rather than being a full-fledged computer, something along the lines of a Macbook Air with a touchscreeen and no keyboard, it's essentially an oversized iphone, running the iphone OS, with the same memory and only a slightly more powerful processor. No installation of programs beyond the typical iphone apps.

To me, it seems to occupy a middleground between the iphone and the netbook that I don't really need filled myself. It has neither the power and flexibility of the netbook already in my bag, which is as light, as small, and cheaper, nor the portability and convenience of the iphone in my pocket.

Still, Apple fans insist it's everything it's cracked up to be, and more. Here are the arguments for it that I've heard:

1. First generation products are always a bit lacking. Give it time, and it will be revolutionary.

I accept the possibility. But the future is another matter, and something that can be said about virtually any product that's currently lacking. Do I want what they have to sell now?

2. Sure, you don't want it, and neither do I. But this isn't for you or other gadget geeks, it's for your grandma who doesn't need a lot of computer power, and just wants something simple and easy to use.

On the surface, this seems like a good point. Programmers see it as a platform for end users who will consume, consume, consume their app store products. They're eager to expand their customer base, and if that means a simple computer that ignores the needs of geeks, so be it.

But I have to wonder about a computer designed for mom, pop and grandma:

1. They make up a very small share of the tech market. For the most part, they ignore it as much as they can.

2. They are the least likely market segment to buy a new fangled gadget, regardless of how cool it is. Almost none of these people even own an iphone, which was almost universally hailed as a brilliant game-changer from the outset.

3. They tend to follow the path of least resistance technologically, which does not entail a trip to the apple store for a new gadget, even one that really would be good for them. It means going to the department store and picking up a safe, generic windows box, which is as much as they can be bothered with.

There is a determination in the tech market to expand the appeal of computers beyond nerds and toward people less inclined to use them. Over the past ten years we've seen even the most technologically clueless people buy and actually use computers for basic functions. The ipad seems to continue this trend.

I propose that with the desktop PC market saturated, over the next ten years, you will see the opposite trend- the technologically illiterate segment of the market will just wither away as the previous generation shrinks, and young people that were raised on computers reach adulthood. It is them that the future of the market lies with. And ultimately it will be them that decide whether or not they need a device between a smartphone with the same capabilities and a cheap netbook of the same size with more options.

I have a final point though- as much talk as there is about how "my mom will love this", how many moms out there actually know about it, or care?

Has anyone actually asked them?

The Chinese Economic Bubble will Burst

2010-01-10T10:34:00.005+09:00

Contrarian Short-Seller bets against China

For the life of me, I've never understood why when China posts all these too-good-to-be-true growth rates, investors don't consider that China might simply be lying. The government has an absolutely horrible record for honesty, transparency, ethics, and even basic human rights. It's actually a much easier call to make than Enron would have been.

People take it as a given that when countries report trade figures, they're telling the truth, and they're not accustomed to doubting them. They need to learn to make an exception in China's case. It's not a free state, and the government is accustomed to reporting what it wants to report, without being questioned. We assume a free press would call them on it, but the rules aren't the same there.

To give an example, a Canadian prof studied the numbers they posted for fish caught and sold, and figured out that if the figures they posted were actually true, they would have fished out their waters by now. And that's just one example. The government does that with everything.

Fudging numbers almost seems to be cultural at this point. This summer I saw someone I knew from high school who's a marine biology student now and works at a research lab in Vancouver. They hired a Chinese immigrant to look after the fish and help with the experiment on a routine, clerical basis. One of his responsibilities was to record the fatalities each day.

But a funny thing- no fish died on his watch. Ever. Months went by without a single death, which is funny, because a given number would be expected even under entirely natural conditions. It put the data of the whole experiment in doubt. What was this guy, the fish whisperer or something?

They confronted him, and finally he admitted to it. When they asked him why he lied about something so routine, he said he didn't want to lose face. As far as he knew, he wasn't supposed to report deaths, because that would make him look like a bad worker. Just keep the official numbers looking good and everyone's happy, right?
...what? You mean you guys don't work that way?! You mean you just want me to record what really happened?!

Saudi Arabia and "Art Rehabilitation Centers"

2009-12-31T13:05:00.005+09:00

Interesting story about the Al Qaeda plotters here. Two of the plotters were released from Guantanamo Bay and handed over to Saudia Arabia. Be sure to check out the video, filmed about the main plotter before the attack even happened, on the left.

American officials agreed to send the terrorist from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia, where he entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and was set free

Um, What?

"The so-called rehabilitation programs are a joke," a U.S. diplomat said in describing the Saudi efforts with released Guantanamo detainees.

Yeah, pretty much sounds like it. And if you watch the video, where terrorists fingerpaint while an instructor theatrically tells them to "put all that anger in the paper!" (in a scene clearly staged for American media, since he's doing it in English), that's pretty much what it looks like, too.

The media theme seems to be "should we be closing Guantanamo in light of all this?" Whatever geographic locations prisoners wind up at, or whatever basic human rights they may be afforded under the Geneva Convention, I think a much better, more fundamental question would be "should we be handing over suspects to Saudia Arabia, who apparently just pay quick lip service to rehab, and then put them back on the street?"

Despite being at the historical center of a lot of the attacks of the past decade, Saudi Arabia seems to have gotten an inexplicable pass throughout this whole war on terror. I think it's important to remember that the original 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia, and that Saudi Arabia got a pass in the blowback because of Bush's oil ties to them.

From the sound of it, the "art rehabilitation program" just sounds like a front to help the Saudi government get their citizens out of Gitmo, but make it look like they were handling them responsibly (which they weren't). Who wants to bet it'll turn out that the Bush admin's ties with Saudi Arabia made this breach of security possible?

Questioning IQ

2009-12-27T21:23:00.005+09:00

Hi all. I've been reminded it's been 3 months since I posted anything. Been so busy...the down time I used to spend watching TV or blogging is now spent with a book in my hand. I've been reading about psychometrics lately, which led me to learn more about IQ tests, the grandaddy of all psychometrics, and the reason many major statistical analyses were even invented. Thought I'd write something about it to break the blogging lull.

The nature of human intelligence is a fascinating topic. What's dangerous is the notion that it can be reduced to a single number that works as a stand-in for a persons' fundamental worth, and that people can then be ranked hierarchically by this single quality, with certain races ranking lower on the scale than others. This ranking is then used as a scientific rational for political decisions, such as getting aid for minorities, under the reasoning that they're born stupid and nothing can be done about it.

Even before I started studying IQ tests in more detail, I had my doubts about the claims. There are problems with claims blacks have lower IQs, and therefore lower intelligence, for example. A century ago, Jews lagged whites by the exact same proportion. Persecuted minorities have a funny way of doing this, and studies show that around the world, minorities of lower socioeconomic status almost invariably have "lower IQs" (and grades, and other standardized test scores) than the dominant majority.

Ever heard of the Flynn effect? It shows that IQs have been steadily rising for 60 years, once you anchor scores so that the average doesn't float upwards. Funny thing is...the difference in scores between blacks and whites is well within the Flynn effect range. So even psychometricians agree that IQ is malleable enough to account for the difference without having to bring genetic differences into it.

There was a study where adopted black kids brought into white homes were tested for IQs. Their IQs did rise...but still lagged their white parents, usually floating in the high 90's.

A problem with this though...one of the first charts you see when you study IQ is one that shows that low IQ people are far more likely to have children out of wedlock. So by the IQ crowd's own research, the parents of the black adoptees likely had IQs in the 80's. So it's not a representative sample.

And finally...with a lot of black kids it's culturally unacceptable to do well in school/on tests. It's generally accepted that this accounts for lower grades in school...but it's not allowed to help account for lower scores on paper-and-pencil IQ tests administered under the same settings?

Even putting the malleability of scores aside, how do we even know that IQ scores are an accurate predictor of anything other than success in entering an institution that requires you have good test scores to get in? Like most people, I assumed the conservative line that IQ scores were a reliable predictor of life success had to have at least some truth to them. So I was surprised to find that for all "the Bell Curve" extolled the virtues of them for 800 pages, when you check the stats in the back, as a predictor of life success they only had an r-squared of .16. It's a good thing the authors put out the book for mainstream consumption. Because those results wouldn't even be publishable in a credible journal.

The truth about Japanese politics

2009-09-07T21:51:00.004+09:00

If you've worked in Japanese company, you know that official power and actual power are separate things. The nominal heads get the salaries and outward respect you would expect them to get. But meanwhile, other people usually run the show behind the scenes.

While you wouldn't know it by reading the Economist, which treats the goings on of Japanese elected officials in the same narrative as western politicians, the same is true of Japanese politics. Most of it is just for show; the bureaucrats run the show, and the elected officials count on them to do it. They don't even really delve into their matters much unless they involve money or re-election. Which is why you see Japan's finance minister speaking drunk at a press conference. Wonder how the world's second largest economy can have such an incompetent person in power? The answer is quite simple, really: he isn't actually expected to do anything. The bureaucratic machine has essentially run Japan since 50's.

Anyway, that's why I usually don't pay much attention to Japanese politics, and why I'm paying so much more now. If I had to bet, I would say the DPJ will fail at what it's trying to accomplish. But it's trying, and that's worth some attention.
Press home and read what else this guy is saying. He knows of what he speaks.

Japan's new first lady says she was abducted by aliens

2009-09-07T09:58:00.003+09:00

Lots of attention being paid to this.

People here just don't seem to mind much. When I ask about it they just laugh it off and go "Yes, she's a little strange, isn't she?". When I ask if it would have changed how they voted, they pause and say no. Not in a partisan, "This is jolting, but I still have faith," way...more of a, "no, why do you ask?" way.

2 points- one, she's a tv personality, and they're expected to say ridiculous stuff to keep people entertained.

Two, most people in Japan believe in ghosts, so there's actually a fair amount of leeway for superstition, so long as you can go about your day after you tell your story. There isn't much religion here, so all kinds of little things fill the void. When you think about it, a sizable portion of the population in the US believes that the earth was created after 2 people talked to a talking snake, and that in the near future a man from the sky will descend and judge us all, one by one.

Not bashing Christianity, but let's face it...people all over believe some pretty outlandish things. But we sanction some of those beliefs as normal, and call others crazy. Elsewhere the distinctions differ.

The Big Election

2009-08-31T06:54:00.004+09:00

The LDP, the political party that has run Japan almost undefeated since the 1950's, just lost in a landslide.
Background here.
More on last night and DPJ policy here.

I've covered it before, so I'll just recap. The LDP has had 3 Prime Ministers in 3 years, all of them around seventy, socially conservative and unwilling to enact any real reforms. The party just couldn't seem to get it in their collective head that people wanted some real changes. They just kept picking the same type of people with the same opinions from the same stock of cabinet members.

Japan's birth rate plummeted in the early 90's. Young people are too fearful to have children in these times of economic uncertainty, especially with the astronomical prices attached to raising children (you even have to pay for junior and senior high school here). The tax base is shrinking, and Japan is running out of laborers to fill its factories and maintain its economy.

There are two options in the face of this problem: allow foreigners to immigrate to Japan to make up the difference, or expand the social safety net so that young couples can afford to have kids. Xenophobic and socially conservative, the LDP has steadfastly refused to do either of these things for going on 20 years.

Traditionally, people in Japan have been indifferent to politics. When I arrived no young people took any interest in them. The LDP shelled out enough pork to keep key constituents happy and drum up some votes via the political machines, and everyone else just stayed away from the ballot box in indifference. But since the departure of Koizumi, the party's only credible reformer, The LDP has seemed to be do everything in it's power to get kicked out of office. They have done nothing to protect the newly emerging class of working poor. Instead of offering aid, they have chastised unmarried Japanese women as "baby making machines that refuse to meet their social responsibilities" (No, that actually is what one official said).

The prime ministers, usually from extremely wealthy families and the grandchildren of former prime ministers, seem incredibly out of touch with the concerns of the general population. When asked, the departing Prime Minister Aso had no idea how much a cup noodle cost, for example. When asked why a recent tax cut seemed to benefit the rich more than anyone else, he complained that the rich (him), needed tax breaks to, and that they shouldn't always just be for poorer people.

To top it off, the LDP was stupid enough to insult its only reliable voting base, the elderly. A few years ago they lost millions of pension records. Recently Aso whined that the elderly contribute nothing to society. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

As a result, people here have become angrier and angrier, and large numbers of young people voted in this election. Kana went to vote yesterday expecting a quick stop, but faced long lines.

Our new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama isn't as much a break from the past as you might expect. Like Aso, he is from a rich family, and the grandson of a former prime minister and founding member of the LDP. But he became disillusioned with the LDP and founded the Minshuto (DPJ) along with progressives. He is described as a centrist, but that may be for the best. Japan moves slowly, and I suspect a truly radical party would be toppled quickly. The DPJ is in for a vicious fight with the bureaucrats that really rule the country as it is.

Still, the DPJ advocates immigration reform, giving parents $250 a month to help raise children, and making junior high school tuition free. How they plan to pay for all this in the face of Japan's huge debt while cutting taxes remains to be seen. But its refreshing to see a political party pushing policies that at least try to deal with these very basic, urgent issues of the day. Its remarkable how long things have gone on without even seeing that.

Scaling Michelle Malkin: A response to Krugman's challenge

2009-08-02T12:18:00.002+09:00

Paul Krugman writes on his blog:

When I saw that Michelle Malkin will be on the Stephanopoulos panel this week, my first thought was that nobody as far to the left as she is to the right would ever appear on such a panel. But then I started to wonder (a) what I mean by that (b) if it’s true.

I don’t want to be like Bill O’Reilly, who considers anyone he disagrees with a “far-left” activist. So we need some objective metric. The most natural would seem to be voter opinion: what fraction of the American public is to Malkin’s right? Would somebody with an equally small number of people to his or her left get on a Sunday morning panel?

The trouble, of course, is how to measure that. In principle, it shouldn’t be hard. What I’d like to have is a Guttman scale of positions on political matters, such that almost everyone who gave the “liberal” answer to question 7 also gave liberal answers to questions 1-6, while almost everyone who gave the conservative answer to question 7 also gave conservative answers to questions 8-13. And we’d want population shares associated with each point on the scale. So we could then take known positions of public figures and place them on the scale: say, we might find that only 19 percent of Americans are to the right of Michelle Malkin, while 23 percent are to the left of Michael Moore.

But if there are any such data available, I don’t know about them. Anyone care to put them together?

It's an interesting challenge. I have my own scaling procedures to worry about, but as a lowly soon-to-be grad student mired in these kinds of concerns, this is how I would start to go about it....

Go to somewhere like Gallup and collect data on general public opinion on a number of political questions (e.g: "I support a public option"), and the likert scale replies that follow.

Use that data to draw out a tentative map of liberal and conservative opinions by general popularity and make a new questionnaire using them. Give that questionnaire to a number of people.

Run factor analysis on the results to see what responses correlate. There should be at least two distinct dimensions, liberal and conservative, but I suspect you would also see a libertarian scale in there, and quite possibly other items that fall less on party lines than you would expect, and don't fit the model.

You can use those results as a filter to isolate items for your liberal and conservative scales. You could also combine them into one scale by reversing the scale on the conservative items before analysis, so that everything moves in the same direction.

Test the refined questionnaire, and run rasch analysis on the results using winsteps. In IRT, questions are assigned a "difficulty" measure. In this case, "difficulty" would refer to the likelihood that an average person would agree. Winsteps will also show you what opinions "fit" the model, and which items (for example, "I think noise pollution is a problem"), don't. It will scale them in a guttman fashion, but in a way that estimates probabilities of agreeing to certain opinions rather than deterministically (as in,"woops, 10% disagreed, guess theres no scale to be found here"). This is usually a more robust model in general anyway, but when it comes to political opinions, which get particularly murky and complicated, I think that approach would be critical to getting a decent model up and running.

For predictive validity, you could run your item "difficulties" (likelihood of agreeing) against the original gallup poll results, and see if they correlate well. That could help demonstrate that the estimated likelihood of agreeing with a given opinion on your survey at least roughly matches the public at large.

Finally, try to estimate malkin's responses on your scale by picking through her writing and making educated guesses as to how she would reply. Putting her on likert scale would be difficult, but it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to score her answers as dichotomous data (simple yes/no responses)

You could also run an analysis on congressional votes to start the scale, but that would get tricky because there are so many different reasons to say yes or no to a given bill, and so many special interests swaying votes and polluting the raw ideologies.

The sound of the top 40 in 2009

2009-08-01T08:15:00.005+09:00

In front of our big 40" TV in the new place. I've been in Fukuoka for 5 years and I'm seeing the American MTV top 50 for the first time in a long time.

It's funny...when you think about the music of 2009, or whatever the current year happens to be, you think of the cutting edge, of vocoders, auto-tune and fashions that piss off old people. You think of Lady GaGa and Kanye West and the rock album Lil Wayne is supposed to be making. You think of the 80's revival, techno and the fusion of hip-hop and club music.

That stuff is definitely out there, and becomes more common the further up the chart you go. But there's a whole other style of music on the charts that beats out the flashy urban sound by an almost 3:1 ratio. On one level, its so timeless, uneventful and generic it almost doesn't seem worth mentioning. But its so different from what you would have seen on MTV 5, 10, or 20 years ago that it deserves some notice.

Who are these artists? It's hard to say, I've never heard of most of them. The most famous artists I can think of that approximate it are maybe Kelly Clarkson and the newer Nickelback stuff. Kings of Leon, The Frey, that guy Daniel something or other. Jason Mraz? They're a bit more rock, but if you played that stuff next to what I'm talking about on the radio they would fit pretty well.

Thematically, the music almost has more in common with top-40 heartland country rock than it does with classic rock and roll or hip hop. If you turned the sound off the videos would look like country videos, even if the actors were younger and had longer hair. The singers are always white and the action is set in small heartland towns in the flyover states. No disco balls, flashy silver rooms or CG effects. No video chicks shaking their thang, save for a blond girl-next-door type that the singer weeps over. Like most genres the songs are usually about love, but they also tell stories of guys that are having trouble paying the bills and teens trying to tell their parents that their life is their own and they want to pursue their own dreams.

The music is guitar based, but strings often back the standard 4-piece band. They usually start out with an acoustic guitar or piano, and then break out into a harder chorus that puts a but of fuzz on the chords. There are absolutely no synthesizers or electronic elements.

A main difference from country rock is that the singers are pros that belt out the vocals with an intensity and passion you wouldn't normally here in country; it has the angst of rock even if the music itself is more conventional. Often in bands, the lead singer/guitarist gets to where they are off the strength of their songs or sex appeal, and the singing itself is just "good enough" level; in contrast, these singers often seem to have gotten to where they are off their pipes first and foremost.

In its own way its uniquely American. Its catchy and driving in a safe, unoffensive way. It doesn't conjure up images of nights of hard drinking on the road or loose groupies like an old Aerosmith or Big Star song would. It has the charge of rock without containing any of the darker messages that would make a politician single it out as what's wrong with society. It's a sound that seems permanent, even though its actually quite new as an MTV phenomenon, when you hold it up against the Backstreet Boys, Eminems, Nirvanas, Guns 'n Roses and Michael Jacksons of MTV past.

What do you call it, exactly? The best name I can think of is American Idol rock. Its top 40 music at a base denominator that has a shot at pleasing people in their 20's and farmers in their 50's at the same time. Its a uniquely appealable form of rock designed for play on major network television.

It may seem like its been around forever, but when you think about it, it didn't really exist at all until this decade.

I'm so glad my netbook came with Windows Vista!

2009-07-19T13:38:00.005+09:00

I needed a light, cheap computer to take with me to Canada for work. What I really wanted was the exact same laptop I got 4 years ago for about $750, a cheap HP laptop with a 40GB hard drive, 1.6ghz processor and a 750 megs of ram, but in a smaller package (the current one weighs a ton) and for less money. Seeing how fast technology moves, that shouldn't be a problem, should it? AFter all, 4 years prior to that, I paid three times as much for a dell with a smaller screen, half the processor power, a 1/4 the hard drive space and 1/8th the ram.

But cheap computers are hard to come by in Japan. Stores push $2000+ monstrosity laptops with HD screens, and almost seem to deliberately not stock the low-end computers that dominate the market in the US. It's true netbooks have introduced a new, low-end market, but they seem like overkill on the form factor end of things. How much work can you really get done with a ten inch screen and a 5-centimeter track pad?

I went to Yodobashi camera and finally found a "Dell mini" which is halfway between a budget notebook and a netbook. It has a 12" screen, big for a netbook, a 1.33 processor, a 60GB hard drive, and 1GB of ram. In other words, it's about what I got for 750 4 years ago, but small and light...about what I was looking for going in the store.

But for how much? The one with XP was $600, a bit out of my price range. But there was an otherwise identical notebook with Windows Vista which was $400, making it easily the cheapest in the store. I asked the clerk if I could just get that one without Vista, and he told me Vista was the whole reason it was so cheap. They couldn't sell any.

I told him I would take my chances and got it. It was easy to see why no-one wanted it- the thing barely moved. Just turning it on ate up close to 80% of the RAM. So I wiped it clean with a copy of XP from my old computer and now it works great.

So in the end, Vista knocked the price of my computer down by a third. Thanks, Microsoft! Vista rules!

New Place

2009-07-11T10:23:00.003+09:00

Wow, it's been so long I don't even know where to start. Got into a Phd program. Taking lots of stats classes. Preparing for finals with the classes I teach rather than take, and getting the curriculum set for next semester. Busy in a way I've never really known...when I get free time from my job I get excited because I can read up on fit statistics and test equating. Yay! That's what counts as downtime now.

Anyway, I'm moving in with my girlfriend and we got a bigger place. Its near Takamiya, in the same range of hills I live now, but a lot bigger. Here's a floor map-

Looking at it now, it wouldn't be a big deal in Canada. But by Japanese sizes, 90m2 like this is enormous. Most places like this in the city go for at least 1000 a month, on the low end, and up to 2500 and 3000 on the high (and those are Fukuoka prices out in the Kyushu wilderness. In Tokyo? Forget it!)

We had one thing going for us though...one, its 25 years old, which in the lifespan of Japanese apartment buildings is ancient people want to live in places no more than 10. In the 80's, it was probably a really swank place. It has an electric toilet with a warm seat, bidet, etc, and a professional gardener comes by to work on all the plants surrounding it. But it's been rendered obsolete by the newer steel and glass buildings with electrically heated floors, and so down goes the price.

More importantly, some houses had been built in the area behind this building, blocking the incredible view and casting the east end into shadow. And the tenants, who as far as I can gather are mostly old people with a lot of time on their hands, FREAKED OUT. They put up protest signs outside their balconies threatening people thinking of moving into the houses and telling them to contact their lawyers. It doesn't seem to have done much to stop the building of the houses (which is totally legal), but they did an excellent job keeping new tenants from moving in to their own building. This new place has been vacant over a year.

The original price was 900 a month, probably down from 1000 earlier. It was a bit out of our budget, so I asked for 800, and they agreed. To top it off when we said we wanted to move in August, they said "Well hell, its vacant now, so you might as well start moving in in July, a free month of rent on us!" So that saves us the stress of having to move in on the very last day of our current leases.

Its gonna be great, shaded back yard or not. I actually like the privacy it gives. See that long balcony on the left? I want to put out beach chairs and little tables for coffee, and lie there in the morning reading the paper on my laptop. We've got a proper living room for guests, a master bedroom, a den for the projector when we do some serious movie viewing, and a guest room when people come in from out of town.

PhD

2009-05-18T20:35:00.005+09:00

Where've I been? I've been busy. Looking to start a PhD soon. The University I have my sights on read one of my papers, and off the strength of that seems to want to squeeze me in to the cohort starting in October (it would be a very late registration). Failing that, they'll let me in next year. Which is fine by me, because I need the time to prepare.

Aside from Thailand spent the spring learning statistics. Started with single variable and worked up to ANOVA and multiple regression. This summer I'll be doing Rasch Analysis and MANOVA and factor analysis courses online. So much for my vacation...I'll have to take my texts with me to Canada when I go back and do the readings during downtime.

Then, between this fall and next spring, I'll be learning data mining through more online courses (probably). The neural networks I was interested in have commercial applications for marketing researchers now (they feed the models reams of data about their customers and try to get the networks to figure out, say, how many of them would be likely to buy a sit-on lawn mower), which means there's lots of books out now to teach people without PhDs in mathematics how to do it, and relatively user-friendly software with graphical interfaces that don't involve command lines.

That isn't to say I don't need to have a firm handle on statistics to do it (logistic regression, multivariate stats, etc), but working with and understanding the models in a basic way has moved from something over my head to something that will be manageable with a lot of work. I think I can find some interesting applications for text and data mining in my own field, and perhaps even for my doctoral thesis eventually. You never know. But putting that aside, I'm interested in learning it for the sake of it.

About a year ago, I wrote about age and limitations, and about reaching that point in your life where you've gone as far as you can without hard work. To my surprise, I've been crossing that threshold and moving beyond what I thought was the peak of what I was capable of. It's been good, and I have a pretty good idea of how much further I can go, and what I need to do to get there.

But it takes up all my time.

Bartering in Thailand

2009-03-13T20:09:00.000+09:00

Went to the Chiang Mai Night Bazaar and got a wood elephant sculpture for Kana. You learn pretty quickly that prices here are higher for foreigners at the markets. You can get it down a lot by speaking Thai, or even just by asking “how much?” in Thai, partly because they appreciate the effort, and partly because they know you must know your way about a little more. But the bottom line is, if you’re visiting you’ll often be paying a lot more for things than the locals.

I think a reaction from some people is to try to “win” at bartering. They feel like they’re being taken advantage of or being played as fools, so they try to hardball negotiations a bit. This just doesn’t work, particularly if you give off the vibe that you think the seller is trying to scam you. It’s insulting, and everyone goes away just feeling terrible. Most people here will take offense to the insinuation they were trying to cheat you, and stubbornly keep to the first price out of pride.
The goal of bartering isn’t to win, it’s to come to an agreement that you’re both happy, or at least satisfied, with. Here’s what I suggest-

-In a market, don’t come to them, let them come to you. Just by starting the bargaining you’re showing you already want it, which puts you at a disadvantage. Just stand around idly looking at the goods as if it’ s more scenery. Make it look like you’re about to move on. (Obviously, this won’t work if there are other people the seller can stay busy with who do seem interested. In that case, come back later, or wait until you get to another stall selling the same thing).

-When they ask you if they can help you, ask how much what you want is in thai, as if its just one of many things there, and you’re just curious about a price since they asked. When they reply, whatever that price may be, just sort of look at it doubtfully. Don’t look insulted by the cost or complain it’s too much, and don’t do anything to suggest you’re entering negotiations with them. Just give off the vibe that it’s not really your kind of thing.

-at this point, they’ll either come back with a testament to the items’ quality, at which point you can repeat step two, or ask you how much *you* want to pay for it. Look like you’re thinking about how much its worth to you for a minute, and offer a fifth what they asked for. Plan to pay about two fifths, but make it look like its give and take when you meet around that range.

-Finally, keep in mind you don’t necessarily need to get the cheapest possible price, just a price that’s cheap for you. Sure, maybe a Thai girl could walk in and get something that you paid $3 for for $2. Well guess what? She probably earns about $150 a month, and the seller knows that. At that point it’s just nitpicking for the sake of it. Relative to your income, you’re getting a better deal, So let it go.

Thailand again

2009-03-12T15:55:00.003+09:00

Back in Chiang Mai. From Fukuoka flights here cost $700-1000, as opposed to $500 for Bangkok. Seemed like a lot for an extra 1000km/1:15 of flight time. I suspected that once I was in Thailand, things would get cheaper as usual. Kevin agreed and told me to just buy a ticket at the airport.

So I got through immigration and customs (completely walked by it actually, without any check whatsoever- They seemed to have other things on their minds) and went up to the domestic departures area. Bought a ticket from Air Asia for the next flight out...for 45 dollars, $60 with tax! Unbelieveable. It was like buying a bus ticket. But cheaper.

So if you go to Thailand, and that beautiful remote little beach is so much more expensive to get to than the nearest smog filled city, don't even worry about it, just deal with it once you're here, in the pricing twilight zone.

Two Train Station Stories

2009-03-10T16:38:00.005+09:00

On the way back from an Onsen with my girlfriend, then I pack and head to Thailand. Yesterday while I was waiting to meet her at the train station, I saw a man, maybe mid 30s, dressed as a school girl, with one of those short brown plaid skirts. Mannish face, though with a wig, and very mannish legs, though shaven. It wasn't completely obvious it was a guy, but clear enough with a second look.

That kind of thing isn't so common in Fukuoka, so I looked at people passing him expecting expressions of shock. But there weren't any. So uncommon is it that no-one did a double take. They just took it at face value that it was a not very attractive woman.

Kana came a moment later, and I mentioned it in passing. It turned out that at about the same time, she had seen something interesting on the other side of that station. When she was waiting at the crosswalk she saw an old man waiting on the other side of the road with a pigeon perched on his shoulder, like a parrot. This was getting a reaction from passersby. He stood with such confidence, such poise...as if it was perfectly natural for one to have a such a magnificent pet at ones' side.

Then the walk light turned green, and the man began to move, the pigeon flew off, and the man recoiled and flailed in terror, unsure of what was happening. He had been completely oblivious that it was there. That was a better story, as people watching stories go.

So I bought an iphone in Japan

2009-03-01T09:29:00.003+09:00

People in Japan were as impressed by the touch technology as anyone else, but overall, the iphone hasn't done very well in Japan. In North America, where the only other things to compare it to are Nokia and Blackberries, it's considered "The Jesus Phone". But here, its just an interesting contender with some fatal flaws. For a long time it didn't have emojis, the animated emoticons that play such a vital role in Japanese text messaging. Second, the camera is lower quality than the ones on phones many carriers give away. And third, it doesn't have a digital 1-seg TV tuner, meaning people with an iphone are missing out on the hottest new cell application here.

And fourth- it just costs too much. Even in America the iphone bills are steep. But then, so are most cell phone bills in general. But in Japan, unlimited data rate plans hovering around $40-50 a month have been common for about 5 years. I went to the carrier's store to look into getting one, and they wanted me to pay $300 for the phone and what would likely work out to be about $90 a month total, even if I never actually used the phone and just used it for web browsing. Why bother? In short the iphone is good...but just not so much better than the run-of-the-mill cell phones here that you would willingly pay double to get one. I know some high-income foreigners that have it, but for the most part, the iphone is just kind of curiosity here, like maybe an antique car, or a craftmatic adjustable bed- everyone is interested to see you have one, but that doesn't mean they would ever seriously consider buying one themselves.

So Apple, or at least their carrier in Japan, Softbank, did something you rarely see- they compromised. The iphone is now available at a reduced rate- free. And the basic unlimited data plan has been reduced from extortionary rates down to about 4400 yen, $40 a month. Now that's more like it! I pay about $45 a month, or 5000 yen for unlimited web browsing on AU (the PC site viewer). The Softbank sales rep worked his way through the Byzantine cell phone plans and figured out a way where I only pay 980 yen for the phone end of the service (and get free calls anywhere in the country to other softbank customers, should I ever use the phone). All told, it'll run me 5711 yen a month for service. That's less than 6 bucks a month than what I pay for web access now, and I get a free iphone for giving them my business.

Side note- Obviously the iphone has less memory than by current ipod classic, I don't have to worry about storage space either, because with the simplify media app, I can stream all the
music on my own computer, and since I have unlimited data I don't even have to worry about racking up charges. Cool eh?

Are students entitled to a good grade if they work hard?

2009-02-22T15:49:00.003+09:00

So researchers at the University of California noticed what they described as an "increasing sense of self entitlement" among their students, who increasingly expect a good, or at least decent grade if they show up to all the classes, do all the assignments, do all the readings, and work hard. The researchers, and many other teachers, see doing those things as the bar for a C, or basic pass, with higher grades going to students that demonstrate exceptional ability.

Many students feel they should at least get a B for all those things. As one student says in the article above, “I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade. What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

For many professors, an A is almost a theoretical, something they would give if the luminaries of their field took their class. I understand that in general the humanities are a difficult field to assign grades in. But I'm going to give my own take on what I think should constitute a good grade.

I think its great when teachers to ask a lot of their students. But if your default grade is always C, I think you need to ask yourself an important question as an educator. Having high expectations for students is well and good. But what expectations do you put on yourself as a teacher? Is higher education really simply a matter of students doing whatever they can, and you judging their efforts with your expert opinion? If that's the case, and you see higher education as simply a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff and the mediocre from the bright, perhaps you could just assign readings, and then give students a norm-referenced test at the end of the year to rank them on a bell curve. That would work about as well. And relieve you of any responsibility for your students education at all.

Or is it possible that you should be taking more responsibility for your students' education on the subject, that you have a responsibility to see to it that what you're teaching is quantifiable, tangible and meaningful, and that you're placing reasonable expectations on students given their existing level?

What you should be aiming for is mastery of whatever material you're teaching. One would hope that you have an idea about what you think is reasonable for them to take away from your lectures after 2 semesters. Lay out those goals for students. If you're teaching statistics, work out precisely what it is that you want students to be able to do by the end of the year. In my own classes, I have a set of expectations for content mastery by the end of the course. I set them based on what I understand to be possible given 28 90-minute meetings, plus an average of 2 1/2 hours of homework/independent study per week. If they meet them, they all get A's. If they don't, they know precisely why...and know precisely what they'll need to do to get an A in the future.

Now, I'm not saying teachers should start giving all students A's for effort. But they should be able to tell students what it takes to get one in clear, obtainable terms. If you consider an "A" to be some kind of ephemeral construct, something that requires some kind of je ne sais quois element that can't merely be described by a checklist of expectations...well, perhaps that says more about your abilities as an educator than it does about your students' senses of self-entitlement. If you can't tell an eager student willing to work what it takes to get an A, consider what it says about you and your ability to teach the course competently, not just what it says about them.

Guarana in Japan

2009-02-22T09:28:00.003+09:00

Japan's localities all have their own special foods. When you go to a given region, you're supposed to get that specialty as a souvenir for everyone back home. So they can go, "Oh wow, [specialty food]! A uniquely [area name] treat! It's not very often you can get this- only when someone we knows travels to the farway prefecture of [area name]!

In reality, a lot of the specialties are manufactured, and limited to sale in that region precisely because its good for sales and the local economy. If a company comes out with a regional-ish snack, it can make more money by packaging it as a souvenir item at a premium price and keeping it semi-exclusive to the area. Every major airport has little stands making a killing selling the local treat to tourists looking for last-minute omiyage.

Japan's northernmost main island, Hokkaido, plays this game more than anywhere else I can think of. Chocolate covered strawberries, butter snacks, chocolate drinks, even their own potato chips ("WARNING:", the sign states wherever the chips are sold, "limit of 2 bags per person!") Realistically, though, the Hokkaido foods have a way of trickling down to the rest of the country if they're really good. You can find the chocolate covered strawberries at import stores, and the limit on how many bags of Hokkaido chips you can buy seems outstripped by the lack of limits on places you can buy them ("WARNING:", the sign by the chips states at the airport shop, your last chance to buy them, "limit of 5 bags per person!")

Interestingly though, there really is a common product that is only available in Hokkaido, not so much because its used for tourists, but simply because its popularity in Hokkaido truly outstrips any interest outside the islands. Elsewhere in Japan, its a rarity. But in Hokkaido, it's ubiquitous. Its called Guarana.
Guarana is a South American plant that produces beans with a powerful stimulant similar to that of it's far more famous cousin from the same region, the coffee plant. While coffee took over the world, Guarana-based sodas are hugely popular in Brazil, to the point where even Coca-Cola has began to market its own Guarana soda in that area. I loved it the first time I tried it. It gives a huge rush of energy that makes regular caffeine pale in comparison. People can't seem to make up their mind what makes it as powerful a stimulant as it is. By some accounts, the active ingredient, Guaranine, is a powerful analogue of regular caffeine derived from coffee, and that its effects are more powerful in humans. By others, the base caffeine chemical is the same, but there just happens to be a much higher concentration of it in the Guarana plant, and any additional effects felt are brought on by other chemicals found in the plant. But whatever it is, it's great! Mike, the guy who introduced me to it, used to use it before playing soccer. He would proceed to blaze across the field in a guarana-induced frenzy, only to crash several hours later. I, being the huge dork I am, used it before writing term papers instead. I'd pound away at the kepad non-stop, and papers that I had been putting off near indefinitely would get written in record time.

Mike had learned about Guarana during his travels in Brazil, and was trying to make some money selling it (among other Brazilian products) here in southern Japan. It seemed natural that it was ready to spread overseas. But southern Japan would have none of it. He wound up giving away bags of guarana extract powder because no-one would bite.

It's too bad he hadn't tried to sell that extract in Hokkaido, because it's everywhere up there. And its not just one company- I counted at least 4 competing brands. Here's a couple pictures. (the makers of the "bear" guarana extract above also market a soda).

Why does it do so well in Hokkaido but not elsewhere? Even the Japanese internet seems mystified. One website theorizes that back in the day, it took a while for Coca-cola to make it up to Japan's most barren, least colonized region. Guarana colas filled the void, and by the time coca-cola made it up there, Hokkaidoans had acquired a taste for it and it stuck.

Come to think of it, in Japan's southernmost area, Okinawa, Root Beer is widely popular. And just like Guarana, it has failed to gain popularity on the mainland. So both of Japan's outlier islands seem to have their own regional cola alternatives. My own observation is that Guarana cola tastes a lot like Dr.Pepper, which, like Root Beer, repulses most mainland Japanese. They all say they taste like medicine. I guess some soda flavors are acquired tastes. If they're established and you have them as a kid, you get used to it and acquire the taste. But if you're used to Coke and have it for the first time in adulthood, they just taste...weird.

City Gas vs. Propane in Japan

2009-02-20T10:27:00.007+09:00

Okay, this is pretty long, but if you're ever in this situation yourself, you'll probably find it pretty useful to know. I know I would have...

I grew up in Canada during the dark ages of electric stoves (what was that all about, anyway?), so using and paying for gas was new to me when I came to Japan. All I really knew was that it powered my stove, and perhaps the hot water for my showers, and at the end of the month, I got a bill for it. One more thing- I knew that it was fairly expensive, and that therefore it wasn't a good choice for heating in the winter. So instead, like most people, I heated my places with kerosene.

But Kerosene has its problems. Its a gasoline product, and your clothes and belongings stink as such throughout the winter (you may get used to it and not notice, but trust me, it's there). You have to buy it elsewhere and lug it to your place. Have to periodically sit on your cold kitchen floor and fill the tank using an awkward plastic pump with a squeeze bubble, getting gas on your hands in the process. To top it all off, with gas prices rising, its not even all that cheaper. So I decided to make the switch to gas, which burns clean and has a dedicated pipe running into my place.

Only one problem- There are only 2 gas outlets in my place, and I was already using them. So I need to get permission from my landlord to install another. I went to the real estate office with my girlfriend, and found out that they didn't want to do it, because the building would be switching from City Gas to Propane soon. (We also found out from the ads out front that the apartments on the floors beneath me, identical in every respect, were going for considerably less than the rent I pay every month. But that's another story).

Back to the propane switch- why? The official reason was that propane had "more power". But that seemed thinner the more I looked into the matter. Essentially, city gas is a public service, and named such because its usually only available in the city, where its practical to build lines for it, as are done for other utilities. A private company runs it, but the city subsidizes it and ensures that like water, its available for a reasonable price.

Propane, on the other hand, is private industry and brought to houses via trucks, which fill tanks outside the buildings. In short, propane is usually used by people out of city limits, who don't have direct lines of city gas leading to their house. Its use is usually analogous to septic tanks for homes in the country. And consequently, its nearly always more expensive. Since propane is entirely free enterprise, the prices range wildly. People out in the country away from city lines obviously pay a good deal more. Within the city, it could be a lot cheaper. But overall, the odds of paying a comparable price seemed pretty low. Online people said they usually paid about 12,000 yen a month ($120) for their propane, whereas I pay on average about 3000-5000.

So why did the building manager agree to it? The short answer is we still don't know. But I can speculate -I do know that city gas requires a fixed monthly fee for the building owner, and that propane doesn't necessarily. So the owner could be saving money, and passing the cost on to the tenants by selling out their city gas to private enterprise. Also, the propane people offered to switch over the hot water heaters for free, giving the apartments a much-needed renovation that would have cost the owners a lot out of their own pockets (this was another bone to pick- I paid for those upgrades out of my own pocket last year. Now they were going to install a new heater, take out the one I'd bought for city gas, and I'd be out $300). It reminded me of in junior high school, when Pepsi paid for new curtains for the school auditorium in exchange for letting them put Pepsi machines in the school. Only in this analogy, the Pepsi costs more than the coke did, and the students are stuck with the increase.

I got a permission form in the mail that I needed to sign stating that I no longer wanted city gas, and would switch to propane. I sat on it. When the building custodian came by asking when they could come into my apartment to switch the lines, I raised my concerns. What's really weird is that my place is just 15 minutes from the city center. Why on earth switch to propane if we don't need to? What's the point? And most importantly- exactly how much more is this going to cost me, anyway? No-one would give me a straight answer, and kept asking me to consult someone else. She told me someone would come see me and alleviate my concerns.

So some propane guys came to my place, waving the permission form. I think the owners needed all of them before they could switch the whole building away from city gas. I raised my concerns and got the usual "more power" spiel. Finally I just asked- "look, give this to me point blank. Measured objectively, how much does city gas cost, and how much will propane cost me?" They cadged for a bit, but eventually came out to an equation that showed propane cost 1300 yen a cubic meter. City Gas, they insisted, was weaker, and twice as much was required to do the same things. "Well okay," I replied. "So how much is 2 cubic meters?" They fumbled with the calculations for a bit and came out with 1100 yen.

I was still dubious that 2 really equaled one, and even if that was true, it was still going to run me almost 20% more by their own calculations. One of the propane guys lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and said, "look, just for you, we'll cut you a special deal, but you have to promise not to tell your neighbors, because they'll be paying more. Just for you- 468 yen a cubic meter."

I felt bad about the secrecy, but having the cost cut by two thirds seemed like a good deal. Reluctantly, I signed the permission...but couldn't help notice that the propane guy looked just a little too satisfied when I shook his hand. Who looks that smug when they just had their asking price slashed by two thirds?

I went back inside and messaged Nick, who has propane and was researching this very topic. "Hey Nick...how much is propane by cubic meter, and how does it compare to city gas?" The answer-

"City gas- about 199 yen a cubic meter.
Propane- It varies. 220-760, with an average of about 450"

They completely lied about the prices...and then "negotiated" down to a price that was STILL above average!!

I called the guy and told him the deal was off. They said they were coming back. I more or less called them complete liars and got the permission form back. They offered 370 yen this time. I said no deal. They insisted that was a great value, and that they couldn't possibly go any lower, but I had no reason to trust them at that point. They went back into their "more power" spiel, and my eyes glazed over. I told them to come back the following week, after I had time to do more research.

Someone posted the following comparison numbers on Yahoo Answers Japan-

12.9m3×2.2(都市ガスとプロパンのガス熱量の差)＝28.38m3(都市ガスの場合の使用量)
1092円(基本料金）＋28.38m3×199.12円＝6743円(西部ガスの場合)

福岡市のLPガス平均価格は、
1821円(基本料金)＋12.9m3×456.2円＝7705円です。
(他に設備代金として、平均220円～760円程度必要の場合あり。)

translation-

City Gas base price 1092 yen plus 199.12 per cubic meter. Used 28.38m3, for a total of 6743 yen for the month.

Propane base price 1821 yen plus 456 per m3 (average rate). Propane is 2,2 times as strong, so the equiv of 28.3m3 is just 12.9. Accounting for that, the price is 7705...on average.

So in other words, the 370 they were offering was a fair, if not spectacular deal. But the propane people had thrown away a lot of good will with that stunt, and I didn't want to take any chances. Once they had my permission to switch, the leverage I had with my existing city gas would be gone and I'd be stuck with the agreed rate. If there was a time to get it down, it was now.

When they came back, they asked me how much I wanted to pay. I said, "same as what I pay now- 200 yen." I finally got it down to 270, and an agreement that I wouldn't pay any "base price" at all.

To top it off, I found out from city gas that my rate is actually 238 per m3, with a base price of about 860, and that I currently use about 12 m3 a month. So even if the "more power" argument had no truth to it, I would be paying about the same. And if it is true, I'll wind up paying about half what I pay now. And I get an upgrade to my heater for free, which the servicemen are installing right now. It's no fun dealing with these people, but if you have to, get the facts and do it right.

Japan's Economy is Falling off a cliff.

2009-01-30T20:04:00.001+09:00

We're talking about 400,000 jobs being cut soon, and the biggest shrink in GDP since WWII. This is going to get very, very ugly.

Japan beginning to encourage immigration

2009-01-25T15:42:00.006+09:00

Good article here.

Japan has long used foreign immigrants, of which they have very few, as a scapegoat for their social ills. As Fukuda, the last of a long uninterrupted string of conservative prime ministers said, "There are people who say that if we accept more immigrants, crime will increase. Any sudden increase in immigrants causing social chaos [and] social unrest is a result that we must avoid by all means."

The Japanese media almost seems to promote the idea that foreigners bring crime with relish, trumpeting any crimes committed by them on the front pages, as if foreign crime is a rampant epidemic happening everywhere, ignoring the fact that by and large, immigrant are actually less likely to commit serious crimes than Japanese citizens. Not more. The same is true in America; for all the heat they get for the country's problems, the threat of immediate deportation makes for a pretty good deterrent.

As I've said before, this kind of attitude may have been safe when the population was growing, but with the declining birthrate, the country can not afford to maintain these prejudices. The population is scheduled to drop by a third in a generation. Japan doesn't even have enough workers to care for its increasing numbers of elderly, let alone fill its factories and companies. So its good to see that even the conservative government is beginning to wake up to the idea that they need to support immigrants and provide them with language training and help them assimilate into the population.

Keeping an entertainment franchise alive

2009-01-10T13:30:00.003+09:00

I've been watching the Tina Fey sitcom 30 Rock, and been disappointed by how stale its seemed this year. In the first season, it was about a single female 30-something producer struggling to keep together an NBC comedy show, and who has sexual tension with her boss. 3 years later, its...about a single female 30-something producer struggling to keep together an NBC comedy show, and who has sexual tension with her boss.

That was fine before, so why not now? Well, in the beginning, the show was a pretty good loosely autobiographical take on the early career of Tina Fey, who was the head writer of Saturday Night Live. But the problem is that nothing ever progresses. My favorite episodes were when she had the boyfriend from Ohio, who was in the running for a big job at NBC. But soon he was gone, and everything was back to square one. That's okay to see once, but after a while it gets frustrating. Its obvious now that she's never going to find the right guy, or get a better job, or move on to movies, or have a baby, or become a star in her own right. At this point, I'd much rather see a show based on Fey's current life than her previous one, or at least a show that gradually moves in that general direction and keeps some kind of momentum. But that will never happen. Life is frozen in one spot, and after a few years it gets old.

This seems to be a problem with a lot of TV shows. It's almost as if they have a reset button at the end of every episode; no matter what happens in 30 minutes -a new job, a rival lover- by the end, everything is back to the way it was. The Seinfeld gang remained in their single early 30's for 10 years, hanging out in the same coffee shop talking about nothing. Bobby on King of the Hill comes close to reaching puberty, getting a girlfriend and coming out of his shell, but never quite seems to move beyond the sixth grade. Other shows change things with a reckless abandon that breaks the dynamics that made them interesting to watch in the first place. Soaps like Melrose Place have the characters coming and going, changing jobs and families and sleeping with one another in every mathematical combination.

The similarity with both types seems to be that neither seemed to have any plan of where to go beyond the first season. Its seems like the producers put all their energy into getting the pilot made and on the air, and none into what they would actually do with it if it was a success and lasted for more than a couple seasons. Perhaps the most famous recent example of this in recent times is Lost. JJ Abrams spiced up the pilot with all kinds of bizaare, unexplainable mysteries. When the show became a success, they had no choice but to invent new mysteries to keep the atmosphere the same. Trying to figure out the mysteries in Lost is like trying to chase a rainbow. No matter how far you follow it, you never quite reach it.

Its funny, because movies, which are usually one-shot deals and have much less incentive to worry about these things, seem to be figuring it out. Let me list off a few famous movie franchises-

Rocky, Rambo, Police Academy, The Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Scream

The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter

What's the difference between them? In the first case, you had a single movie that did really well and stood on its own. Then, they attempted to milk it by making more, with diminishing returns. In the case of some of them, you probably forgot that they were even supposed to be franchises, because history has forgotten all but the first. Occasionally a sequel will beat the original, but its up and down, and in the end, they all trail off into nothing. In the other, you have movies that had an overall arch that followed the characters for more than one movie. This is the reason star wars held up so well through the first two sequels, because the story had a momentum to it.

TV series, which are designed to last several years and for several hundred more hours of footage, have much more reason to think this way, not less. Obviously, the writers cant script out 3 years of shows before it even gets picked up. But they should at least have a general idea of where its going to go in advance, even if it takes years and years to get all the way there.

I think the best way to do it is to dole out small, incremental changes every other season or so, just enough to give the show fresh material to draw off and give the sense that the characters' lives are progressing, but not enough to break the dynamic that made the show a hit in the first place. The best example of this that I can think of right now is Entourage. Slowly, Eric is branching out on his own and finding other clients, Ari has started his own company, Johnny has gotten a part on a pretty successful TV show, and Turtle has a girlfriend. But the show still revolves around Vincent and the ups and downs of his career, which moves along at a satisfactory rate, but never quite takes him to a level of fame where he doesn't have to worry anymore.

Japan sees biggest population fall yet

2009-01-05T21:25:00.003+09:00

Here at the Guardian.

Actually, Japan saw its lowest birth rate about 18 years ago, and its up this year by 0.02% or so. The difference now is that the large pre-war generation is aging and beginning to die off at a faster rate than babies are being born. Caring for the disproportionately large numbers of elderly is now big business in Japan. There are far more of them than there young people to support them or pay their social security. And it will only get worse as the boomers age.

Now, the advanced nations of the west have abysmal (if not quite this bad) birth-rates too. So why is it such a big deal in Japan?

Because unlike Japan, those countries have aggressive immigration policies. People from India with engineering or medical degrees can become Canadian citizens really easily. The province of Alberta goes to England and tries to entice people with medical backgrounds to emigrate.

Japan just won't hear that. While in theory its possible and legal, in practice almost no foreigners ever become Japanese citizens. The only immigrants they accept are phillipino hostesses for the nightclubs, and poor chinese to do the drudge work in factories for lower pay and worse conditions. A servant class. And to add insult to injury, they're all here on temporary work visas.

Japan desperately needs to replenish its labor force. This country's economy relies on skilled labor, but they have a serious shortage of engineers, and it will only get worse. They can:

A) Instead of blaming single women for not marrying and having kids (and "not fulfilling their duties as baby making machines", as one government official put it), they can invest in Japanese education and offer enormous benefits to couples that have children. The cost of raising kids in Japan is astronomical, and few want to do it in times of economic uncertainty. The government should be forking over something to the order of 2 or 3 million yen per child in benefits, tax breaks and baby bonuses. Sounds ridiculous, but when you consider each child is a future worker, its a pretty sensible investment.

B) Attract educated, skilled foreigners to move and work here, and grant them citizenship and a path into the society.

Something tells me neither option is forthcoming.

Timbaland steals a lot of samples

2009-01-01T23:16:00.007+09:00

Check out this song Courtship Dating by the Toronto band, Crystal Castles, which has been getting critics excited this year. They use sounds from old 8-bit nintendo games, and give it an electro bounce and really spooky, grating vocals. It's really good-

Penguin Swimming Hole wrote,

Courtship Dating”...could be the beat to next year’s number one hip-hop song

Actually, Timbland is way ahead of her- he already sampled it last year. Check this out.

Looking into it, this isn't the first time he's done it, either. I discovered that one myself, but check these out from youtube-

Sampling an artist that works with video game sounds, like Crystal Castles-

Sampling Arabian music-

What I've heard is that he's very lazy about clearing his samples. He just steals the pieces of music and puts the tracks out, and if anyone complains, he lets them settle it with the label's legal department. It probably costs him more to do it this way than it would be to just get permission in the first place, but he earns so much he doesn't care.

People into the video game culture are outraged, but actually, this is pretty par for the course for hip hop, which builds almost every thing out of samples. The difference being, most producers stick to sampling soul records, James Brown or Parliament. Timbaland samples some really out there stuff. Its one thing to be James Brown, who already had a deal and a name, and have to deal with this stuff via lawyers. An aggravation, but you have the team to deal with it and see you get paid. But if you're just a guy doing music as a hobby, it must feel like a punch in the stomach to hear someone stealing your music and making half a million dollars off it.

Edit: just found a comment by someone who talked to Ethan Kath of Crystal Castles, who says that the Timbaland isn't a sample, but appears to be a re-creation of the riff using the same SIDstation synthesizer:

I spoke to Ethan about it and he said that neither one is sample.
He said it sounded to him like Timbaland listened to the CCs song and wanted to imitate that sort of sound.

Ethan uses a sample of ETHAN playing a SIDstation on his track.
Timbaland probably used a SIDstation to create the similar sound on his track.

(from Gameboy Genius)

Live forever- Aubrey De Grey

2008-12-26T09:44:00.006+09:00

Merry Christmas! Its been over a month since I last posted. Have lots going on and lots to say, actually...just no time to write it. But its Christmas break now, so I'm posting on what's on my mind at the minute, which is Cambridge biologist Aubrey De Grey.

De Grey says he has tracked the main causes of aging -which can essentially be defined as the gradual failure and decay of the body after long periods of continuous metabolism- and gives his ideas on what can be done to prevent that decay from happening. In other words, he believes that through science people could live for hundreds, if not thousands of years, in a relatively "youthful" state without ever dying of old age. He offers a prize for anyone who can disprove his proposition.

The ideas are interesting, though I notice the documentary stops short of describing those cellular processes in any serious detail, opting instead to compare De Grey to Da Vinci, and focus on character and personality issues of the man. On his website, you need to become a member before he'll even venture to explain.

Even assuming the cellular arguments are sound, I can think of one thing that he can't stop from aging without some negative consequences- the mind.

"Maturation" and "aging" are two different things. Aging involves the death of cells, etc, which can be replaced. Maturation is another matter. Unlike your physical body, which is bound to have 4 limbs in adulthood regardless of what you do (and regardless of what little use they might be of in the alien terrain of a dramatically different future), the mind has some plasticity in its youth that allows it to adapt to novel circumstances. That's why kids around the world grow up to learn very different languages with ease. Its also why its nearly impossible for anyone through adolescence to learn a second language completely fluently, without the slightest trace of an accent, and why blind people can't comprehend what they "see" if surgery corrects their eyes some time in adulthood. You only have a window of time in childhood to master these tasks, when your mind is still new and malleable.

But once that development is complete, or in its later stages, it is difficult to go back. As an analogy, imagine that a young mind is like a pan of wet clay, and that the pattern required to adapt to life in the US resembles a starfish.

Now imagine that a person is transported back to ancient Mongolia and must now live under Genghis Kahn or something. The pattern required to deal with that requires a seahorse. But now what option do you have to change? Its not just a matter of health. Neural Network models that have no issues with decaying cells have the same problem. Early in their life they can adapt to accommodate a new operation. But as time goes on they reach a point of no return.

In a way, that's in line with what he's saying- you can't reverse aging, just slow/stop it. But you never know when circumstances will change in such a way that the mind could need to change. A brain that appears to be the picture of youth and eternal resilience can encounter great difficulties as the terrain changes. In a way that a young, still immature brain will not. That's why innovations come with youth and future generations. Because their minds have the flexibility to adapt to these new circumstances, and view the new terrain in a fresh light.

There are some brilliant older people that still jump on the latest technology and buy and understand the marvels of computers and iphones. But they are few and far between. That kind of flexibility is a testament to their great intelligence, which most people do not have, regardless of what you could do to them to cease aging. And even in these cases, using novel technology is a rather trivial, superficial change in the times. It would pale to the changes in circumstances that a thousand years would produce. Sure you could live forever. But remember- you may not be able to live the way you're accustomed to. You may have to speak a different language and live by very different social mores. If the great men of the 1830's (to say nothing of the 1200's, or 300 BC's) were all still alive, even frozen at a youthful 40, they would still hold the traditions, mannerisms and convictions of the past. And they would be incredibly tiresome bores.

People living in Japan, marveling at the snail-like pace of its politics- You think its difficult for things to progress and change in Japan now? Just imagine if the emperor-worshiping crowd that got japan into WWII were all still alive, and still running the show (and given Japan's respect for the elderly, they all still would be). Good lord.

The Japanese economy is now officially in recession

2008-11-17T19:50:00.003+09:00

It's official.

My Japanese teacher applied to teach English at my university. We thought she had a shot, but the college was inundated with resumes, over 100. Even the lousiest part time jobs in town get far more applicants than they can possibly accommodate.

Glad I got full time work before this kicked it. It'll be long, it'll be nasty, and it'll be worldwide.

How to make a home theater in Japan on a budget

2008-11-16T11:12:00.015+09:00

So you're in Japan teaching English, and making do with hand-me-down furniture and appliances from the last teacher. You really wish you could get a big screen TV, but they cost a fortune, and besides, you may not even be in the country for more than a year, and you'd just have to give it away anyway. What to do?

One thing I've learned about technology in the past few years is that a little extra money goes a long way. The bicycle is a good example. The standard, gearless model in Japan is 10,000 yen, or 100 dollars. If you go up to 350-500, you can see enormous improvements, including front wheel suspension, gears, and a much lighter weight. These additions improve your bike by 100%. The next step up is to over 100,000 yen or $1000, where you can get a lighter frame and disc breaks...which are nice, but don't add anywhere near as much value relatively when you consider that the price just doubled. Finally, when you double the price again to over 200,000 yen or $2000, you find yourself reduced to miniscule improvements, like using a titanium alloy to reduce the weight by an extra 5% or so.

The moral is that while the very best thing may cost a heap of money, the next best thing, or even merely the next next best thing, delivers nearly as much quality for a fraction of the price. And the law applies to home theater as much as anything else.

So here's what you do-

1. Buy this Acer DLP projector currently on sale at Yodobashi camera for 45,000 yen, or about $450. Despite its powerful 2000 lumen, 4000-hour bulb, Its small, lightweight, portable, and comes with a carrying case, so you can take it over to a friend's place to watch a movie or play some video games, and of course, take it home with you if you leave. It's designed for use with computers to give power point presentations and the like, but its about as good as you could possibly need it, and delivers a very crisp and bright picture up to 300", even in the middle of the day. When I show people pictures of the image they can't even tell its a projection not a normal television. You can use an old VCR, which all have TV tuners, to see standard TV. And you can hook it up to your laptop and use it as a separate monitor. You can watch The Daily Show via the free online stream on the big screen, and keep on using the original screen to surf the net, like I'm doing in the photo above. In this photo the screen is 60" wide, with the picture taken on the other side of the room, about 3 meters away. The picture looks grainy due to the quality of the net stream, but TV and DVDs look much better.

If you go online, you'll see home theater aficionados turning their noses up at this because its not every bit as good as 10,000 dollar plasma TVs that give a picture the same size, or high-end, 130,000 to 300,000 yen projectors specifically designed for 1080p HDTV. But the resolution rate is still well beyond what a standard TV signal or DVD requires, and will display all those shows you download with as high a resolution as you can possibly see them in. It can show HDTV too, though scaled down. If you upgrade a step to the 65,000 yen model, you can get a resolution rate very close to the HDTV format American broadcasters use for shows like Lost and 24.

Remember, just 6 or 7 years ago, projectors with far worse specs were considered near top of the line, and sold for $4000 dollars. Today, when the same thing is twice as bright with 5 times the contrast for nearly a tenth the price, the Home theater critics that review this projector turn their nose up at it a bit for not being every bit as good as the brand new $5000-10,000 systems, but concede that, "for someone who just wants a projector to invite people over to see the odd DVD or sports game, this should certainly be adequate." Be that guy! Use the extra 950,000 yen you save to spend time out of your darkened TV room enjoying Japan.

2. While you're down in the basement computer section of Yodobashi Camera, pick up a computer speaker system that has tweeters and a subwoofer for around 3000 yen. Again, not as good as a home stereo system for 50,000 yen plus. But very good for the money.

3. Need a screen? Most cost 10,000-50,000 yen, all for what essentially amounts to an expanse of flat white material. To hell with that- Go to an art supply store or bookstore and get some sheets of white A3 poster paper. Duct-tape about 8 sheets together, keeping the edges as tight together as possible. Now reverse sheets to the clean side, and thumbtack it to the wall. If you squint when the color on the screen is white, you may be able to detect thin lines between the sheets. Other than that its essentially no different from a commercial screen.

4. Like I said, the screen is surprisingly bright even in the day (we're watching it now), but to get full quality, go to Muji Ryushi . This store is getting popular overseas and considered a stylish, Japanese answer to Ikea. But don't be fooled by the appearance- it can be surprisingly cheap. You can pick up some expensive-looking curtains that block 99.7% of all sunlight (literally, according to the specs) for just 1300 yen each.

And that's it. Enjoy!

Taking the train

2008-11-08T08:29:00.004+09:00

Public transport is big in Japan. The cities are packed too deep for cars to be of much use. But the population is very centralized and subways and trains are extremely efficient and run like clockwork. Everyone uses them.

Every Monday I take the rush hour morning express train to Kurume. They only run every half hour (as opposed to every 5-10 minutes for local), so the lines for them build up. Its a long trip difficult to get a seat.

On the platform, there are markers to show where to stand and wait. A sign by the platform instructs people to line up in 2 rows. And 90% of the time, that's what everyone does. But sometimes I go in the morning, and there's just a single line, sprawling snake-like down the platform. Why?

Apparently, early on, just one person was standing there. Another person came along, and instead of standing beside them to form the second row like they're supposed to and like everyone usually does, they stand behind them. I have no idea why.

So then a third person comes along. They know that they're supposed to form a second row, but that would mean cutting in front of person two. This being Japan and everyone being extremely considerate, person 3 gets behind them. And so it continues single file, the grip of shame increasing with every new person added to the line. If people feel bad about cutting in front of one person, think how bad it is cutting in front of five.

Until of course, I the foreigner come along and start the second row like the sign says to. And immediately, half the people in the long line move behind me. Nobody wanted to be the first to do it, but if someone initiates, the dam breaks and everyone else does it too.

Being the initiator can incite bad behavior in others, too. Sometimes I park my bicycle in a zone downtown where no other bikes are. When I get back from shopping my own is surrounded by ten others.

It's over.

2008-11-05T22:31:00.005+09:00

After almost 2 years, the 2008 presidential election has finally ended. Last I checked Montana, Missouri and Indiana were still being counted, but by the end, the map looked more or less like this. As you can see, Obama crushed McCain, taking the crucial swing states like Ohio and Florida early on. Now the only question is precisely how many red states flipped this year, to pile it on and add insult to defeat for McCain.

Some people have asked me why I'm so into this election. As you can see from the looming global recession brought on by Bush deregulation in the US, what happens in the US effects the whole world. Too often, the US has been a rogue power, invading nations as it pleases and refusing to work with other governments on any serious global initiatives to solve world problems.

Even taking the Obama hype with a grain of salt and allowing for the inevitable compromises and dissapointments , he could change all that. The US could start co-operating with the UN again. They might join the Kyoto protocol, make a world court to catch terrorists with international co-operation between police departments, global intiatives to work toward green energy...I think we'll see a lot more of that now.

Obama's win could also mark a historical shift. Traditionally whoever holds the south takes the elections, and the Republicans have been experts at getting that vote by playing up the everyman image and playing on white fears.

But the map is changing. Immigrants have been flooding into the US, and salsa has now outstripped ketchup as the #1 condiment. Those people are beginning to find their votes and voices, and they're beginning to have political weight. More and more of the country is getting concentrated in urban areas, where people have to learn to become more tolerant of one another.

Obama could be the mark of a new political coalition, a growing rank of younger, more educated, more urbanized voters, and minorities that are tired or feeling excluded from the American dream. Obama crushed McCain even without the south. And the southern states he did win, like Virginia and North Carolina, are seeing demographic changes and more minority voters.

So maybe, just maybe,the stereotypical American president in the Bush mold could become a thing of the past. That's not to say another Republican will never get in, but they may be less able to play on the electorates' fears, and get in the same war-starting jackasses.

Maybe. No promises.

Bonus shot-

The department head was laughing when I said Obama would win 8 months ago. He said I was crazy if I thought a guy called Barack Obama would stand a chance against the GOP. Then he got carried away...and bet money. He said he was going to use the proceeds to buy a life size McCain poster to greet me each day and remind me of my stupidity.

Here he is paying up, head bowed in humiliation. I'm using the proceeds to buy an Obama poster to put where his McCain one would have gone.

Care to go double or nothing on Obama signing the Kyoto Protocol, Luke?

So I designed my own Sneaker today

2008-11-04T18:48:00.004+09:00

I always buy Nike here because they're the only shoe company that consistently makes size 12 's. Usually I get stuck with whatever color and style I can get. All the really cool shoes are Japan only and therefore only go up to size 11. Things are getting worse, too. It seems like there are fewer options every time I go.

Only now, you can design your own shoes with Nike ID. I'd seen it before, but at the time they only had one or two generic designs to choose from, and all you could do was tweak colors. But now they have a wide range of shoe templates and colors, and you can even choose the materials. So I sat down and put this together at the store in about ten minutes. Everyone in the self-design corner seemed to be getting really into it. Click on the link and give it a try.

The goal with this was to take a really stylish sports sneaker, but to cast it in conservative colors, so I can wear them at work on a casual day and so they match my other clothes. I like the modern sneaker designs, but I can't stand all the gaudy, barf-neon yellow colors they always come in.

I wanted to get a classic, two-tone 1950's golf shoe/bowling shoe vibe, so I did the black and white theme. I made sure the base was black so it won't look scuffy if they get a bit dirty. Then I gave it a gold swoosh to give it a touch of distinction and pizzaz, and a subtle green rim and outline...not too much, nothing to overwhelm it or throw the basic black/white design out of balance.

You can emboss a 10-character message on the inner side. I had no idea what to call it and putting my own name seemed lame, so since it was November 4th today, I just wrote "Obama '08" to commemorate the day. Am I obsessed with this election? Yeah, pretty much.

Busiest week ever

2008-11-03T11:37:00.002+09:00

Last week I...

Taught 10 classes
Finished writing a paper and submitted it for publication
Crunched out numbers for experiments
Wrote and submitted a ten page proposal for a $30,000 research grant from the Japanese ministry of education
Prepared a presentation
Flew to Tokyo to give the presentation
Spent the night before said presentation in the hotel room putting together yet another presentation to do on the same day at the same conference, because I hadn't had time to do it during the week with everything else.

It all came together, though. We got invited to give the same presentation at a university in Nagasaki, which was nice.

Yogurt flavored Pepsi: Pepsi White!

2008-11-03T11:26:00.002+09:00

On the heels of Cucumber Pepsi, Pineapple Pepsi and spicy Pepsi Red comes yet another limited-edition Pepsi in Japan, Pepsi White. This one is yogurt flavored, giving the Cucumber variety a run for its money in the "wow that's weird" category.

Actually, yogurt flavored soft drinks are pretty common here, including the classic Calpis. I'm actually a huge fan of one such drink brewed in Miyazaki, called Skol (The Mango flavor is particularly good). But this one just doesn't work. I remember how we all tried to mix cola and milk as kids, and I remember the verdict at the time- not particularly awful, but in the end there's really no reason to do it.

I tried it the other day, and that basically sums it up. It's sugar, water, some carbonation, and a muddled flavor that's hard to place and can easily be lived without.

Japanese iphone to get emoji icons!

2008-10-27T20:36:00.003+09:00

One thing holding the iphone back in Japan is the lack of emojis, the ubiquitious emoticons used in all Japanese emails. Its not just a neat little gimmick here, they're necessary, and people can assume you're angry if you send a text message without them. The detail is buried here.

Japan becomes a country of working poor

2008-10-27T20:25:00.002+09:00

So much has been made of Japan as a society that takes care of its own with fantastic benefits. For a long time it enjoyed a reputation as a middle-class society, without extremes of very rich or very poor, where everyone was equal.

That all changed this decade. In wake of the recession big business lobbied government to cut them some slack, and "reforms" were enacted. The old laws required companies to pay generous benefits to full time employees, and made it difficult to fire anyone. In theory, that system still exists. But like so many other things, the government found ways to preserve the formalities and official rules, but allow changes through the back door.

Now, about 40% of employees in Japan are "temporary" workers, filling jobs via employment agencies. They work in the same offices as their full time counterparts, and do the same job. But they are paid via another agency and earn far less, with no benefits or security. So you see, Japan still has excellent employee rights...its just harder and harder to become one in the first place, that's all.

Good story about it here.

Interactive map of McCain campaign's robocalls and direct mailers across the US

2008-10-25T22:38:00.002+09:00

Gotta hand it to the Obama campaign, they're fast and 21st-century about how they do things. Through their network of volunteers they've compiled every last detail of the McCain offensive. Even if you're a McCain supporter it's interesting, because its the most comprehensive breakdown of the McCain campaigns' attack plan in this final week you'll see anywhere. Click on the marks for recordings of the calls and scans of the mailers

http://radar.barackobama.com/

Bonus: A reporter inside the McCain campaign chronicles their attempts to brand him this past year. It reads like a eulogy.

Review and Reflections of the third and last presidential debate with Obama and McCain, plus the full video, plus the Joe the Plumber video

2008-10-16T19:33:00.004+09:00

It's all here! The debate-

McCain gave his best debate performance yet, but its far too little, too late. voters handed the debate to Obama 58-31, and swing voters favored Obama even more, 58 to 23.

All this when the meta-pollsters doing 10,000 election simulations a day based on weighted aggregates of all national and state polls now find Obama winning 95% of the time, with a landslide 353 electoral votes. That would spell doom for McCain even if he killed it tonight. Instead, it saw undecideds breaking toward Obama 2-1 (about 18% going to McCain and 38% deciding to vote for Obama, with the remainder still making up their minds).

Obama has become a much more polished, and much more typical, politician over the past year. In the summer at the saddleback religious forum, where he appeared alongside McCain and answered the same questions, he spoke from the top of his head, uttering his often-mocked ers and ums. To some he sounded indecisive and wishy-washy. Some conservatives claimed he was forgetting pre-fed lines, and didn't realize they were witnessing the opposite- a politician that really and truly was trying to answer honestly and thoughtfully on the spot (to mixed results)

No more. Obama is a gaffeless, teflon campaigning machine now. Everything out of his mouth sounds like it was cleared and deliberated by a dozen aides. Nothing McCain ever does seems to shake him or put him on the defensive. Even his common reaction for when McCain issues an embarrassing charge (looking away and smiling), seems to be measured and pre-planned. He's unflappable. And the "body language" crowd, the types of people that think its more important the way a politician sits or looks at his opponent is more important than what he actually proposes to do, just laps it up. They wanted a typical politician, and they got it. To speak in crass pundit talk, he is the "alpha male" here.

Go to the 24:50 mark in the debate video, when the sparks start to fly and they start talking about each other's negative campaigning and things like the people at McCain/Palin rallies yelling "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" about Obama. He scolds McCain for getting emotional about how much it hurt him to hear Civil rights activist/congressman John Lewis accuse him of inciting violence. And McCain looks down in embarrassment when he talks. The image of the hardened experienced war hero vs. the dangerously green naif is shattered. McCain may be older, but fair or not, Obama looks like the grown up here.

Obama got McCain pretty good when he tried out the old "He still hasn't told us how much that mandate will cost" line in ref to Joe the Plumber. Watch his facial reaction here-

He's dumbfounded. Obama said it in the last debate, but he's awestruck in disbelief. Count the deer in headlight blinks.

Wonder who Joe the Plumber is? He's not a new spin on "Joe Sixpack"- he's a real guy that Obama discussed taxes with when he campaigned door-to-door in Ohio the other day. Here's the vid-

Like many conservatives, Joe may not be fully decided on McCain, but the subsequent interviews he's done demonstrates that he was already fully decided against a democrat, and nothing Obama can say will convince him otherwise.

Last night he told CBS News on their webcast that "He danced around my question better than Sammy Davis Jr." Ewwwww...ok, your 15 minutes of fame is up. Now.

Bonus- a picture of McCain after the debate. (Not photoshopped).

It's over.

Japanese Nikkei Stock Market Plummets Like Stone through Still Water, loses 25% of value

2008-10-12T13:56:00.004+09:00

The Nikkei lost 25% of its value over the past week. This is the worst crash here in 59 years, which is creepy, when you consider that 59 years takes you far past the crash that led to the bubble burst that ended Japan's golden age in the 80's, and all the way to the 1940's, not too long after two atomic bombs were dropped on this country, its capital city was burned to rubble, and the Japanese empire officially fell, leading to a decade of extreme poverty here that left many survivors of that period short from malnutrition.

Shares for companies like Toyota and Sony are selling under the net value of their assets, which means that the market is treating them as if they'd be better off just selling everything right now and going out of business than if they pressed on. A little extreme, don't you think?

Recall the Great Depression of the 30's. Men that picked up stock in General Electric and other survivors during those times made millions. I know how counter-intuitive it sounds when everyone is panicking and fleeing the market, but this strikes me as a great time to buy. Even if the next great depression does happen world wide this coming year, eventually, eventually, life will go on. Its important to remember that before the panic, people knew Toyota was positioned to become the biggest car maker in the world over the next few years, what with General Motors tanking. And Toyota's commitment to good mileage and electric cars puts them in a great position in this changing world. The shares may well plummet further as the world goes to hell. But what about 10 years from now? What about 20, or 30? What about 40 or 50? As you approach retirement in the far future and look back at the past on the investments you could have, would have and should have made, I suspect a lot of people will be kicking themselves for not snapping up stock during the great crash of '08.

(Big PS- No-one here knows a thing about it. The panic seems to be fueled by foreign investors, the same crowd freaking out back Wall Street and elsewhere. Bizarrely, most people I talk to here don't know a thing about this yet.

As far as the big picture goes- the government, the economy, the stock market- I learn a lot more outside of this country and through foreign news sources than I do actually living in it. Its like living on HAL in the movie 2001. On BBC World you can see that in Parliament, people are -sometimes literally, screaming with limbs flailing- freaking out. Then you turn on national TV, and they're barbecuing fish and marveling at the chef's roasting technique, or taking a tour of a park in Hokkaido. And a calm, pleasantly monotone voice seems to emit from the television, saying "Remain calm! All is well!")

New Japanese Tourism Minister: "Japanese don't like or desire foreigners. We are ethnically homogenous"

2008-10-05T08:10:00.005+09:00

This from the cabinet of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Aso. Aside from the racism and backward thinking in an age when Japan has a plummeting birth-rate and desperately needs immigrants to replete it's work force, it's also astonishing in its sheer incompetence: This idiot was the Minister of Tourism.

He has been forced to resign. But my suspicion is that the only significant difference between him and the rest of the cabinet is that he was stupid enough to say something like this out loud. In 2005, the same guy (Nariaki Nakayama) said he was glad that descriptions of how occupying war-time Japanese soldiers kept concubines of "sex slaves" out of textbooks. The conservative new Prime Minister Abe knew exactly who he was appointing, and its likely that he and the rest of his cabinet reflect the same views.

In the past, Nakayama has already served as the transport minister and the Education minister in previous cabinets. The point? The "new" Taro Aso Cabinet is just the same old guys from the past shuffled around, doing and saying the same things. Aso is just another insider, and nothing has changed.

I'm really fed up with the Japanese government since Koizumi. Koizumi pushed some much-needed reforms in the extremely corrupt government system, putting an end to racketeering by Yakuza and heavily curtailing pork, but was eventually pushed out. Since then, 2 Prime Ministers have come and gone, each resigning after less than a year. The first, Abe, responded to Japan's serious issues by legally requiring school children to become patriotic through public education, as if singing the national anthem each day will solve anything. The second, Fukuda, faced opposition from the entrenched party interests for trying to push reforms, and became a scapegoat for all the country's problems in the public's eyes at the same time.

The new PM Taro Aso probably won't have trouble from the backrooms for trying to push reforms, because he is likely aligned with them himself. He is by far the richest man ever to become Prime Minister of Japan. His hometown is in Iizuka, near Fukuoka, and his family owns several businesses in this area. I suspect the construction businesses his family runs will be seeing a lot of pork soon enough.

With the exception of Koizumi, who more and more is beginning to look like an anomaly blip on the radar that won't be repeated, It's just more of the same, every time. The same political party, the LDP, has run Japan almost continuously for over 30 years, making elections almost a formality. The party chooses its leader, not the public, so everything goes on from the inside. And it's the same types of people, again and again and again.

When things go sour, they bring in new blood by getting a wealthy socially conservative, 70 year old man who thinks the answers to Japan's problems in the 21st century is to look to the past. When that fails...they bring in new blood, with a wealthy, socially conservative 68 year old man who thinks the answers lie in the past.

If that doesn't work? Well, there's a party insider who relatively young at 69. He's spunky, socially conservative in a tough way and knows how to get things done. You just wait, he's really going to shake things up!

EDIT: On the other hand, the new PM Aso did once say that he wanted to "make Japan the type of country that rich Jews would like to live in". Now, it's possible he just meant that figuratively, as in, just make it the kind of country they would like to live in, though he still wouldn't have any intention of actually letting them in.

But as perverse and sad as it sounds, if he meant it literally, it would actually be a pretty encouraging and progressive policy on immigration....by LDP standards, anyway.

Does Obama's race hurt him or help him?

2008-10-04T15:40:00.005+09:00

For sensible people, it won't matter either way. But beyond a few southern states where racial tensions run deep (and where they would have gone red anyway), there's a chance it may actually help him at least as much as it hurts him. Let me explain.

There are two types of racism among white people, hard racism and soft racism, or "cultural" racism. Hard racism involves people that really and truly believe that people from a different lineage than themselves are inherently inferior. Thankfully, these people make up only a small percentage of the population.

Soft racism, however, is far more prevalent. Soft racism involves antipathy toward cultural markers that differentiate minorities as out-groups, for example, clothing, slang, heavy accents, music, customs, etc. These things make minorities seem different from white people, and therefore questionable or scary. These people have issues with people that walk, talk, dress and behave differently than themselves. They may attribute these differences as having to do with the out-groups' race. But, as unjustified as it remains, ultimately it is the different behavior that makes them wary and fearful.

The point of this is that unlike hard racism, soft racism is malleable and subjective to the individual. If a minority person dresses, acts and speaks the same ways as a white person in the same walk of life, even many white people who can otherwise be soft racist will feel relief and warm up to them relatively quickly. They will put that minority in a different category from the "other ones", and soon they will forget about that person's descent altogether.

By acting like a white person, minorities can often alleviate a lot of soft racism among people that know them. Not all, I hasten to add. But a good deal of it. Indeed, some black professionals have said that when they reach the top, they feel that they have been "anointed" by their new friends and associates. Racism still exists, it just isn't directed at them so much, at least by the people they know well and deal with every day.

Obama himself is keenly aware of this fact. In his 1994 memoir Dreams from my Father, he wryly noted how easily he could get out of trouble as a teenager just by smiling and acting non-threatening "People were so relieved to see a young black man that wasn't angry that they would let anything go" (He noted that the one white person that this didn't work on was his own mother).

There are minorities that have thrived after thwarting soft racism. One of the most visible examples is Obama's fellow Chicagoan Oprah Winfrey, who may be one of the wealthiest entertainers in history. She is beloved by tens of millions of housewives across the nation.

Here's a question- If being black is always a hindrance in America, does that mean that Oprah Winfrey could possibly be more successful than she already is, by being the same person she is now, only white? Somehow I doubt it. Winfrey is at the top of her field. Its hard to imagine her -or anyone, really- being more successful than she already is. It's even possible that for some strange reason, it oddly became a benefit. Maybe people were more comfortable hearing about the taboo topics Winfrey started her career discussing when it came from someone who was likeable, relateable and empathetic, but also in other ways a bit of an outsider.

In Obama's case, once he convinces whites that he's just like them and part of the club, being black could just be another way of setting him apart from the typical politician. The stereotypical corrupt politician is an old, over-polished white guy with silver hair and an easy, slightly superficial familiarity with others. It may not be a conscious reaction, but some people that have come to trust Obama as normal culturally might look at him and go, "I think this guy is different from the other politicians. I can't put my finger on why, but I don't think he's the same as all the others".

The No-touch Smart Play Condom

2008-10-02T21:58:00.003+09:00

I got this as part of a free promotion in Tenjin. Guys- don't you hate getting these damn things on? Half the time its hard to tell which way to put it on, and then there's the agony of unrolling it from itself. With this condom, the edges have pull-tabs that yank it on to your member in one smooth, continuous roll. So in theory you can get it on in a single motion without even touching it.

On the wrapper the guy says to the girl "hey, have you heard about the lastest super cool thing?" and goes into the pitch, while, apparently, dropping his pants and demonstrating how its used right then and there. And she's all like, "Wow, really and truly no touch!!

More Political Stuff: Obama up by 8% after the first debate

2008-09-29T21:21:00.003+09:00

Have to apologize if you're getting tired of the political posts. I studied American History in college and have followed American politics pretty closely since. And if you're into this kind of thing, the past year and a half has just been incredible political theater. Regardless of who wins or loses, this race will go down in history. This stuff'll keep up until November for sure, but I'll try to get some Japan posts in too.

Anyway- yeah, Obama's up post debate. That's according to Gallup. Rasmussen has him up by 6, and every other major poll gives him a healthy lead. The electoral map shows a big shift to Obama, with gains in important swing states like Virginia.

The word out of the McCain camp is that they're going to...go negative. Even more so, I suppose. So McCain will spend even more time calling Obama naive, and try to give people doubt he can protect the country from Rogue States and terrorists. despite the fact that focus groups of swing voters showed that that behavior more or less directly led to a defeat in public opinion after the first debate. You could literally see peoples opinion of McCain plummeting on the live graph every time McCain used those lines.

Meanwhile, Obama is gearing up to talk about the one issue on everyone cares about now, the economy. Post debate, Obama leads McCain on the Economy 66% to 42%. And when it comes to "understanding your needs", Obama leads 79% to 41%

And their answer to all that is to talk about Iraq and Iran? Good luck with that, guys. They really are a one-trick pony. Scare people with terrorists, and try to make the election about character and personalities. That's really all they know how to do.

The sad thing is John McCain could easily have won this election. Its easy to forget after the past couple years, but he really did used to be a centrist kind of guy that could work with the democrats. The country wanted change, and he could have given it to them, or at least thrown them a bone. He could have pushed to keep Bush tax cuts, but not cut taxes for the wealthy and oil companies even more than before, as he is now. He could have supported a withdrawal from Iraq, but made a big hullabaloo about how they would "win" by doing it, so that the right wingers felt the troops were returning after a victory. He could have started banging the drum to track down Bin Ladin in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which everyone would have been happy about, left, right and international. He could have offered a real plan for creating jobs with green energy, and getting off of oil.

In short, he could have stolen all the center to conservative-leaning stances that Obama is running on, and simply not openly, vocally opposed the liberal-leaning stuff that he's planning. And if he had done that, people likely would have trusted him to do it all over some new guy no-one had heard of.

But he's not. He's digging his heels in Bush-style diplomacy, and sneering at Obama for not seeing the world the same way Bush and Cheney do. His foreign policy is identical to theirs. Rather than just keeping quiet about it and letting the rich and the oil companies keep eating cake in the background, He's planning to run up the deficit even more by cutting taxes for them even more still, playing right into the populist cry that the rich are running the country. And he's been promoting deregulation even as Wall Street falls apart from its own excesses.

I hate to call stuff early, but barring some huge gaffe from Obama or massive voter fraud in a swing state, I think this is the beginning of the end, and its more or less over now. He's not giving a positive vision of where he wants to take the country, just trying to make people fear the other guy. And that just isn't going to be enough this time.

I have one little worry about the Vice Presidential debate though- the expectations for Sarah Palin are so incredibly low after that last interview that all she has to do is show up without vomiting all over the podium to be seen as pretty good. The McCain camp has the debate format changed to a shorter, more sound-bite oriented affair with less interaction between the candidates. So all she has to do is show up, look confident, smile and say a few memorized lines, and everyone will think she's great.

Debate Afterthought

2008-09-27T19:58:00.011+09:00

Again, both did well, but looking at the debate again now, Obama came out ahead on this one, subtly, but in the end surely. Not with the "knockout punch" that every partisan wanted to see for their man, not with glitz or a great little zinger soundbite for tomorrow's news, just a steady, consistent performance and demeanor that will serve him well with the people in the center that are still making up their minds on who to vote for.

First, the issues. Obama simply has a more compelling argument for the middle class, which is most people. He talked to the audience, not just the moderator. The polls show watchers are more convinced he would handle the economy well by a wide margin. The economy is what's on everyone's minds right now. That's the main issue of the season, and that's the issue Obama has come out front on.

It's true that McCain did a good job sounding convincing on foreign policy, especially around the 55:00 mark in the video of the debate in the post below. But it was an impassioned argument for the Bush world view of how to deal with Iran and other hostile states. There are conservative pundits claiming that McCain "schooled" Obama on foreign policy, establishing a master and student relationship. But you show me someone convinced that McCain mopped the floor with Obama on foreign policy, and I'll show you someone who voted for Bush both times, and would do it again if they could. He made a great argument for the Neocon view of the world. But as we all know, that's not where the center of the country is in 2008. The majority agrees with Obama on Iraq, and the debate polls show that while he still trails, Obama narrowed the gap on foreign policy last night, bringing McCain's lead from a chasm to single digits. It didn't widen like the McCain camp must have hoped it would.
If anything, all his performance did was demonstrate that on many issues, he really is just like Bush.

Second, the undertone things. McCain doesn't look at Obama once throughout the entire debate. When Obama addresses him, he just stares ahead stonily. When Obama makes a point, he looks down and gets this weird smirky insecure smile on his face.

As partisans, we're all looking for that great little jab by our man, and get excited when the opponent appears to show weakness. But swing voters don't see it that way; that stuff just turns them off, and McCain was doing more of it. McCain's camp is jeering that Obama agreed with McCain 7-8 times, as if that makes him his junior. But they should pay more attention to what swing voters thought. Focus groups using knobs to display approval and disapproval during the debates had no problem with this, and gave McCain considerably low ratings when he used his 5-times-repeated "Senator Obama just doesn't understand that..." line. The swing voters want the politicians to play nice, and Obama is doing a better job of that.

Prediction- McCain showed some contempt for Obama tonight, as if he's resentful that he even has to debate him (perhaps literally, considering he didn't plan to come). I suspect he's holding his temper a fair amount right now, at least by his own standards.

If Obama sees a spike from this week over the next few days, you could start seeing McCain start to flail and become increasingly touchier and on the attack during the next few debates. His base is screaming for blood, and his cheerleaders at The National Review have all kinds of zingers ready for him. He may begin to heed their advice and attack, much as Hillary Clinton did with increasingly desperate and nasty swings during the final debates of the primaries. Obama will keep his cool and not rise to the bait. Gradually, he'll look more presidential, and McCain will begin to look less authoritive and more petulant. And simply by keeping up his current path, Obama will squeak to victory.

This is why I've always thought Obama would do well, even when his poll numbers were lagging and everyone was screaming for him to fight back and change tactics. He has the winning policies, character and strategy, its just a matter of riding out the storms on the way, not getting distracted by the opposition, and getting his message out to lower-information voters that aren't already glued to the news. He isn't winning through spikes in the polls through quick, overnight changes in strategy. He's winning as the slow, steady guy in the race.

Obama-McCain Debate, Friday 9/26: Full Video, Reviews, Reactions and Polls

2008-09-27T12:43:00.012+09:00

Here's the entire debate, in case you missed it-

I'm pretty cynical about these debates. Kerry and Gore told off Bush on the facts, but all the public heard were a bunch of sighing, pushy know-it-alls, while Bush came off like a regular guy who had the force of his convictions, even if he wasn't a big pencil-necked arrogant nerd like them. The body-language and tone of voice seemed to matter more than what was actually said. Like it was a task in calming scared wild animals.

So for me, this wasn't about who would win the argument. As far as I'm concerned, Obama won these arguments over a year ago, and McCain doesn't have the facts to change any of that. As cynical as this sounds, it's more a matter of who looks like they're winning, and I was worried. Obama has most of the facts on his side this time around, but he also has a habit of beginning most of his sentences with a series of ums, ahs, and false starts. For a lot of people, that might be all they hear. And while his ability to hear out both sides is a good trait, when it comes to shock-button issues like finding and killing Bin Ladin, that kind of attitude can come off as wishy-washy and weak.

The debate started out with McCain speaking high-mindedly about bipartisanship, while Obama stayed snappy, judgmental and accusative toward McCain and the Bush administration. The early spin-verdict: "He needs to project warmth!" It looked pretty bad.

But surprisingly, McCain took the bait, bought into Obama's frame and started acting the same way. McCain is a skilled politician that has a way of dodging questions without looking like he is, and keeping his confidence and sense of conviction the whole time. Obama wouldn't let up, and corrected mischaracterizations of his positions politely but forcefully and firmly. The result was a tense but measured debate without any major knock-outs on either side.

The big surprise? According to CBS after the broadcast, viewers Obama won this 40%-22%; and almost 2-1 margin. (Minutes ago, they released preliminary results of an official poll, which put Obama as winning among undecided voters 39-25, and leading on the economy almost 2-1). He led on every issue except terrorism, and he only lost that by about 7%. And the funny thing is, I'm pretty sure McCain led by more than that going in. So there's a good chance he actually turned people around on this.

46% of voters left with a more positive opinion of Obama, with only 7% saying they left with a more negative one. That's damn good. And the best part? One of the swing voters CBS kept in a room to gauge reactions from said he thought Obama won because he seemed relaxed and in control, while McCain "showed more emotion". So it looks like Obama is even winning the little mannerism game at this point.

Why such an surge of enthusiasm for Obama over what was at best an average showing by his standards?

My theory is this- Me and most of my friends that are pro-Obama have been watching this race in great detail, so we've seen him at all the press conferences, seen him act this way, and knew that this was what he was capable of, and that he could well have demolished McCain tonight. So for us, this was basically a draw, at best.

But the average low-information voter still doesn't know much about him. They buy into the hype that he's just an empty suit that needs a teleprompter to sound good, and that McCain is a decisive leader who has the experience and knows what he's doing.

Going into this debate with that frame of mind, one could only think, "Wow...Obama is actually a really articulate, knowledgeable, intelligent guy, and what he says actually makes a lot of sense. This guy really can go head-to-head with an experienced war-hero like Senator John McCain."

To that I can only say...well, duh. But I'm glad popular opinion is coming around. Gallups' last day of tracking had Obama up by 6-8 points in wake of the McCain-Campaign-Suspension debacle, averaged to +3 along with the previous 2 days of tracking. Add the response to this debate and allow a few days to let the lower earlier numbers fall off, and you could be looking at a good 5-8 point lead for Obama by next week off all of this. And this time, he may actually keep it.

Update: Video on the poll with changes. New stat- opinions on Obama's readiness to be president rose 13% among undecideds after this, 35 up to 48. Meanwhile, McCain's far superior figure of 79% going in slipped by 1 percent. So bottom line, Obama gained ground during a foreign policy debate that should have been a McCain stronghold, and McCain basically just held even.

Update 2: More interesting Poll results here.

Update 3: Even FOX News's focus group polling shows Obama came out ahead with voters-

Worst Sarah Palin Interview Ever.

2008-09-25T20:08:00.006+09:00

I've never posted -and hardly ever even watched- Katie Couric interviews up until now. Now, I'm posting two in one day, one with John McCain, and one with Palin. They must have figured Couric would go easy on them. I'm as surprised as they must have been, but boy, were they wrong. Especially in this interview with Palin.

Palin's speech at the RNC was a Republican homerun, but this interview is everything people thought her interviews would be when the news first hit she was joining the campaign; flustered, insecure, beaten down, uninformed and unsure what to say. Katie Couric looks like she's staring her down and trying to psych Palin out as she talks- successfully, it seems. I actually feel sorry for her at this point. It's awkward to watch.

Bonus- Part 2

The weird thing about this is that Katie Couric has had a reputation of being not just a lightweight, but as a Bush cheerleader. Of all the major media outlets aside from Fox, CBS has arguably been the most conservative-favorable in its coverage. Up until now they've treated McCain evenly even as CNN, ABC and NBC have gotten progressively more pissed off at his campaign.

I was student council president in high school, though a lot of people hadn't really seen it coming. There was a guy in my sociology class that thought only really popular people had a shot at it, and that it was ridiculous even trying to run. But a lot of people supported me, including this sort of ditzy in-crowd girl we'll call Suzy Q and her friends. After the election I saw him in class and he just shook his head and said, "You know, when I heard that even Suzy Q was voting for you, that's when I realized that you were actually going to win."

That's kind of who Katie Couric reminds me of. There's a base of 35-40% that will always vote for a Republican no matter what, but in the center there's been a slow, gradual process where middle-of-the-road people that were generally happy with Bush are beginning to shift over to Obama and away from McCain. Not in a fanatical, caught up in the hype way...just a general, gradual movement in cautious popular opinion.

Video: McCain Suspends Campaign, Does interview with Katie Couric on CBS

2008-09-25T08:45:00.006+09:00

He's calling to suspend the debate, which most people see as being a chance for Obama to do well. I just don't know...check this out.

Watch CBS Videos Online

2 things strike out to me-

1. He talks about how now is not the time for campaigning, but here he is on TV and he sounds like he's on his soapbox the whole time, whining about how his opponent didn't agree to town hall meetings 6 months ago, talking about how he likes polls that have him up and hates ones that have him down and it'll be a close election for sure, blah blah blah. WTF does that have to do with anything? Aren't you supposed to be in Washington getting things under control right now?

2. He sounds freaked out, which is really worrying. He goes on about how "trusted, respected people" (Like Paulson) are telling him this could be a huge crisis, and he believes them. He's kind of losing it...the last thing people need is a leader running around in a panic. He doesn't sound like he understands the issues better than anyone else.

Here's Obama's response, when asked if he's considered suspending his own campaign-

"It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once," he said. "I think there's no reason why we can't be constructive in helping to solve this problem and also tell the American people what we believe, and where we stand, and where we want to take the country."

You know, at this point, it goes beyond politics, policies and political views. Shut your liberal/conservative brain off for a few minutes, and just watch these two guys, as if they were just a couple random people interviewing for the same job.

Pretend you don't know which is the Democrat and which is the Republican. And ask yourself- Which of these politicians seems to have their act together more? Who seems more in control of things?

On that "take advantage of travel opportunities" bit...

2008-09-24T20:32:00.003+09:00

Thinking about going to Shanghai en route to Thailand this spring. Someone I know from highschool is working at an advertising agency there, and it seems like a pretty cool setup, so I want to go check it.

I want to go back to Canada for the summer, but family members are pushing for a trip to Sweden, which is where my Mom's side of the family is from originally. I thought it would be too out of the way/expensive to do both, but its actually feasible...

All I need to do is buy a round the world ticket for about 1,600 or so, much cheaper than the tickets would be individually. Head west to Sweden, meet my mother and sister there, then head back to halifax with them after continuing westward. Then do Toronto, maybe montreal, and continue west back to Japan.

And if I'm doing all that, I might as well make some extra stops at some other places on the way to Sweden.

Its a bit of a pinch because I "only" get 2 months off in Summer, and I may be starting a Phd that July, at which point I really would be extremely busy. But hopefully then my job will be going smoothly enough that I can fit in at least 3 weeks for that. The Spring break would be better because its longer and less busy...but does anyone want to spend February in Sweden and Canada?

Good Restaurants in Fukuoka, Part 2: The Minami-ku Edition

2008-09-23T17:33:00.008+09:00

Indian: Parkash (Takamiya Station, Takamiya)

For the most part, "Curry" in Japan just means a simple brown powdery sauce poured over rice. But there are a surprising number of really good Indian restaurants run by Indian immigrants in Fukuoka, at least 5 I can think of. One of my favorites is Parkash, above in Takamiya. When you leave the station you descend into a square with a fountain and statues. To your right are two restaurants, McDonalds and Parkash, pictured above (picture from Kenko's blog).

The food is good, it's clean with a good atmosphere, and the staff is really friendly. The main attraction, like most places, is curry with Nan bread. Prices vary depending on times of the day. Ranked in rough order from cheapest to most expensive- Weekday days, weekday evenings, weekend days/holidays and Weekend Evenings. The upside of this arrangement is that if you happen to be around Takamiya around lunch on a weekday, you can get a good vegetable curry set for about 600 yen.

American: Burgers from Okinawa (Noma)
Noma 2-5-13 Open 11:30-22:00, Closed Wednesday
Delivery 092-512-1259
Recently opened from a restaurateur that used to operate in Okinawa, catering to US military. At first glance, the burgers look pretty typical, but the secret weapon is the meat. They aren't kidding when they say "home-made"- the proprietor actually grinds the hamburger himself from base meat each morning and seasons it himself. Other than that, it's additive free. You've never had a burger that tasted so healthy. With most burgers, all the extra condiments basically serve the purpose of masking the fact that you're essentially eating low-grade meat that wouldn't be edible otherwise, but these patties stand on their own. My girlfriend complained it looked small for the price, but a lot of that has to do with the shaping; its two or 3 times as thick as most burgers.

Click to enlarge the menu. As you can see, prices range from 450 yen for a small standard burger to a whopping 1450 for a "regular" (read: American size) double Avocado special. I recommend the Hawaiian burger, with bacon and pineapple. Looking at it now, the menu says it's especially popular with foreigners, and sure enough, I made a beeline for it. Click the photo of the menu to enlarge and get a taste for what you're in for.

Directions- head south down Takamiya-dori from Tenjin until you get to Ohashi. Past the post office, there's a large intersection (Noma intersection) with a large tunnel on your right and a bicycle shop ahead on the far right corner. Turn right down the tunnel. Out the other side, it'll be on your left. If you live in the neighborhood they also do delivery.

Thai: Osha (Ohashi)

Abe Bldg. 1F 1-23-21 Ohashi, Minami-ku, Fukuoka 092-551-2175
Open: 11:30 ~ 14:00 / 18:00 ~ 24:00 Closed Monday

Most Thai restaurants try to go upscale and charge an arm and a leg, which is a shame, because if you've spent much time in Thailand you know that the really good food to be had is at the cheap roadside stalls. How come every Thai restaurant has to have a dress code and zen Buddhist statues by the door? Why can't you just get the cheap stuff? Now at Osha, you can. I remember coming directly from Thailand and finding it too a bit lacking, but now that I have some distance from the original food and have lowered my standards a bit I think its great, at the least some of the best food of its kind in Fukuoka. They put a good deal of effort into getting the original ingredients. Even basic spices and vegetables that can be bought in Japan are imported if the Thai variety differs in any way. They were kind enough to give me fresh thai ginger for my own cooking, for free.

Music Review: Van She "V"

2008-09-21T21:52:00.003+09:00

Everything old becomes new again. It seems like we constantly mock the styles and fashions of the decade past, but honor those of the decade before as even cooler than we realized at the time. When I was a kid in the late 80's the 60's were cool, and the 70's were considered an atrocity on all that was good and pure. In the 90's, movies like Dazed and Confused and Boogie Nights and shows like, well, That 70's Show, hit their stride, and it became okay to admit disco was actually kind of kind of fun.

In the past few years even the darkest corners of 80's fashion has gone from lame to de rigeur, with Girl Talk lacing southern rap with shades of shocking Miami Vice pink. There's also been an upsurge in bands that use sythesizers to back up the standard drums/bass/guitar lineup, creating a type of synthpop reminiscent of Depeche Mode, Human League or New Order.

Which brings me to Van She. I had always known Van She as a techno remix outfit, as you can hear in the video above (They also did this great remix of the Klaxon's "Gravity's Rainbow"). I was surprised to discover that by day they're actually a pretty typical band from Australia, complete with drummer, guitarist and lead singer. It's really not bad at all. I like their new album V better than anything by the Klaxons. While they still don't have a big hit on their hands that really distinguishes them from the crowd, their music is remarkably consistent and will grow on you. A video tour-

Kelly, their first single. Very 80's.

The Cat and the Eye. Not my favorite song by them, but you can see why the label made it the single.

These are the tracks with videos, but I like them best when they lace the sugar pop with a snarl. Check out "It could be the Same" on the album, a blistering indie-rock number backed by overdriven synthesizers.

Goals

2008-09-21T13:21:00.007+09:00

The other day a (western) professor came down from the Economics department to talk to me about a class we're both working with. He was chatting with me and another lecturer and I idly asked him how his summer had been. As it turns out, he had:

Gone to Germany.
Gone to Istanbul.
Gone to Vietnam to study the language.
Taken a 13-day motorbike trip across the northeast.

At first, we got that flash of envy that everyone always gets when they hear someone else talk about doing great things. That sort of reflexive, "Gee, I wish I could do that, only I don't have enough time/money/lack of responsibilities" line we always tell ourselves as an excuse for not doing cooler stuff with ourselves.

But then it occurred to me- This person has almost the exact same life situation I do. Its true he earns more than I do, though even that probably balances out with the part-time work I do elsewhere. Its true he's tenured and I'm not, which can make a big difference in terms of work. I have a paper due in a month and two presentations to prepare for in late October. (I'm also in the office on a Sunday right now, which says a thing or two). But even the busiest people I know don't work every day. Bottom line, given the free time I have, if I don't find/make the time to do at least half of those things even amidst all the other stuff I have to do, it's on me as much as on any external excuse I can give.

I made some goals for myself a few years ago. I wanted to live in Fukuoka, have a university job, lots of surplus time and money, and someone to share it with. It took me a while to do it all, but one by one, all those things fell into place, and all the things that have traditionally held me, (and presumably most people) back from doing more- vacation time, money, career goals, etc- have more or less ceased to be issues.

So the future is now. The old goals have been met, and its time to make some new ones.

Random, probably ignorant observation

2008-09-18T21:40:00.005+09:00

This is just in my own experience. Someone will probably jump in the comments and point out gaping exceptions. But anyway...

I know several half-Japanese, Half-western people, and a few half-Chinese, Half-western people.

The bulk of the half-chinese people I know tend to look predominantly Asian. Once you know one of their parents is white, you can see the features. But they don't strike out at first.

However, nearly all the half-Japanese, Half-western people I know look predominantly white, and it often isn't at all obvious one of their parents is Japanese unless they tell you. Again, the features are there, but if you saw them on the street back home and weren't looking for them you would often just assume they were white.

Kid's Energy

2008-09-13T14:15:00.004+09:00

There was a get-together at work with family invited the other day. 2 kids worked out a game- one would chase the other around the restaurant, around and around and around in circles, shrieking the whole time (we reserved the whole place). It wasn't even like there was ducking and weaving or anything, just on a single, uninterrupted, repeating path.

An hour later, they were still at it. Non-stop.

The department's youngest Dad told me he had read a study where a professional marathon runner was put in a room with a 3 year old, and ate proportionately what the child ate, so they got the same amount of energy for their body mass. Then, they told the athlete to do whatever the child did.

After a few hours, he just couldn't keep up. The kid exhausted him. It's not that anything they do requires a lot of strength, but its this uninterrupted charge of movement and random activity.

Where do they get the energy from? The kid had eaten almost nothing, even given his size. It literally seems to defy the laws of physics. They actually seem to expend more energy than they take in. Forget windpower...to solve the energy crisis, we just have to study little kids, and find out how they can run around for hours on end like that on a half an order of small fries and a mott's fruit cup. Or better yet, we could just strap them up to a turbine so that they generate electricity as they chase each other.

Obama vs. O'Reilly: The Complete Interview

2008-09-11T20:28:00.005+09:00

For the past year, Progressives have been intent on trying to undermine Fox News Channel's credibility as an objective, unbiased news source by pressuring Democratic politicians to not dignify it by appearing on it. After the channel parroted unfounded internet rumors that Obama had attended a Madrassa as a child in the Philippines, the candidate all but boycotted the station.

It was with mixed feelings on both sides that Obama agreed to an interview with conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly, (albeit during the RNC, guaranteeing him a huge conservative viewership). Some diarists on Daily Kos protested that Obama was weakening the entire party by allowing O'Reilly to shout down the party's presidential nominee (the nominee being, you know, him). A lot of people on the Left take it as a sign that Obama is just rolling over and playing dead, and losing by allowing the Right to frame the arguments, and playing by their rules.

But actually, doing this is very much in character for Obama and consistent with his philosophies. During the primaries, Obama was billed as a moderate that had the respect of Republicans, because they trusted him to hear them out and deal with them respectfully. In this interview, he proves he can walk the walk as well as talk the talk on the line, all the while advancing his own position. Any Obama fans that didn't watch out of principle missed one of the liveliest and most persuasive interviews he has ever given. He was assertive, but gracious. He schooled O'Reilly on the facts in a way that no liberal on the Factor ever has, without once losing his cool or treating O'Reilly with anything less than respect.

While it's true O'Reilly tries to talk over him on several occasions, focusing on that misses the bigger point: Obama came out of this winning O'Reilly's respect, which most on the left would never have thought possible. And while I doubt he'll be switching candidates just yet, O'Reilly has now even told his viewership that he trusts Obama on foreign policy. If Obama can win over this guy, he can win over anyone.

Here's the entire interview, Parts 1 to 4, Thursday September 8 to Wednesday September 10.

Part 1:Foreign Policy, Iraq, Pakistan

Part 2: The Economy and Taxation

Part 3: Jeremiah Wright, Ayers and the Left

The one interview where Obama flounders a bit. In the end, asked to give the name of a conservative friend, he stammers and can't say anything. Then he protests, "If I name someone, people will complain I'm comparing them to Bill Ayers!" In a perhaps unprecedented show of grace, O'Reilly chuckles, concedes the point, and lets it go.

Part 4: Oil, Green Energy, Relations with Europe, More Foreign Policy

Actually, this interview could mark a sea change for Obama on Fox. Apparently, behind the scenes of all this, Obama has formed a tentative truce with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.

Want to hear some really good Japanese Electronic music?

2008-09-09T18:21:00.003+09:00

Not novelty weird stuff on the internet good, but actually might track down the album and really get into to it good? Check out Sonpub. I like it as much as Justice and all the new stuff coming out in the west.

Embedding is disabled, so link one is here.

This video is pretty bad, but the music is great. Ride out the house-y beginning and let it hit its stride.

But the sad thing? Those youtube videos were put up by UniversalMusic Japan, a major company, and yet so far they only have about 2000 views each. That's shameful. But apparently he opened for Daft Punk recently, so its probably only a matter of time before he reaches a wider audience.

Long Term in Japan

2008-09-08T09:33:00.004+09:00

It's beginning to look like I could be in Japan for a long time. Its not that I necessarily plan on doing it, or that I'm applying for permanent residence. A lot of it depends on my career and other factors. But the fact remains, if I got a tenured position in this city, and things shaped out that I would live here for the long term, I'd be quite happy with that.

That surprises a lot of people at home. It didn't surprise anyone I stayed for a few years, but it does that I wouldn't move back to Canada. Why?

To start with, the basic stuff- I really like the city I'm in, and it's dependent on that as much as the country it's in. Living in Fukuoka is a lot different from living in, say, a small village up North, just as living in Toronto is a lot different from living in the Yukon, or living in San Francisco is a lot different from living in Alabama. And it has everything I want from back home in terms of food, books, movies, clothes and other creature comforts. It's true I don't see my family more than once a year or friends from back home very often. But with the net and skype, no-one really seems that far away if you really want to keep in touch with them. And beyond that, one thing I learned after college was that moving was going to be a reality anyway. Most of my friends all moved to Toronto after graduation, some to BC, some much further. Realistically, I would have had to have relocated and made new friends no matter what I did in Canada. And the distance between say, Toronto and Nova Scotia is so wide I realistically wouldn't have seen my family more than once a year anyway.

There's a second level to it too, though, and that's the comfortability level of living in a different culture. Living out in Asia seems like the kind of thing that would be fun for a year or two, but that you eventually move on from. As a friend speculated the last time as back, "At first, everything is new, but eventually you get used to it, and then it's just another country".

Very true. While you might make Izakayas, sushi and sumo wrestling a regular part of your life, the fact remains that after a few years, the novelty wears off, and it just becomes everyday routine. The upside, though, is that if you like your life, that's really not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing, because at that point, you end your vacation and just get back to normal- you just happen to be doing it here instead of somewhere else. I don't really have any of the frustrations of adjusting to things that I had in my first couple years here. As far as the few that remain, what I began to realize was that they were well within the threshold of frustrations I'd face anywhere in the world. Let's face it- are you really comfortable with the way things go in your home country 24 hours a day, all the time? What about last week when comcast put you on hold for an hour, and then gave you the runaround with your bill? What about that rude nurse that gave you a hassle about visiting your friend in the hospital because there were only 10 minutes left to visiting hours? What about the traffic? What about the calls from telemarketers?

We accept these things as "the way it goes" and just get on with things, and yet if we experience somewhat novel inconveniences in other countries, we chalk it up to a problem with the entire culture. When you think about that, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Not like it's a deal breaker either way, but the truth is when I think about it, after several years out here, I actually put up with fair deal less hassle in my everyday life here than I do in Canada, not more.

I know people out here that have been in Japan over a few years, and aren't happy about it. But if you look more closely, there are other things going on. Maybe the main reason they came out here and stayed was for the girls and to have a good time, and now they're a bit older and that just isn't enough anymore. Maybe they're stuck teaching English conversation, and hate it, but can't find other work. Maybe they never learned to speak Japanese, and just get frustrated not being able to communicate with anyone outside of their little bubble. Worst of all, maybe they just stay not because they're happy with it, but because they're just not sure what else to do with themselves.

All good reasons to not like it here. But do they really involve Japan itself that much? It reminds me of people that go to New York, don't really get to where they want to go there for whatever reason, and then spend all their time blaming New York City itself as the root of their problems, as if the very concrete conspires to make them unhappy. Its easier and more tempting to blame an entire foreign country and culture for your problems and frustrations, but in the end it makes about as much sense; its not that the place is fundamentally bad, per se, just that in your given situation, its not all that good for you.

Once you get used to it and get in a situation you're happy with, a city in Japan just becomes another place you feel at home at and another place you could live. Some people from back home moved out to Toronto, some England, or the Netherlands, or Shanghai. And you're where you are, one other place on the list of places you could be.

Songs from the back of my hard drive

2008-09-07T21:47:00.007+09:00

I was cleaning out my computer yesterday and came across some songs I did on my old laptop when I first came to Fukuoka.

It brought back some memories. I had come to Fukuoka with almost no money to start with and no job arranged, and was making ends meet with little part-time things. In winter, I started a couple weeks of unpaid vacation from my already low-paying main part-time job. I didn't have any money so I couldn't really go out, and it was cold and drizzling rain so I couldn't even enjoy outdoors. There was a girl I was dating, but she lived far away and had to work long brutal shifts for all but the last few days of the stretch. So I downloaded a music sequencer at a net cafe, burned it to CD and took it back to my internetless laptop, got some tutorials via long distance phone call from my friend Kunal in Toronto (he paid), and started programming little songs on it huddled under my blankets to save on heat.

The main claim to fame with them is that none of the riffs are pre-made loops taken from the internet; I put everything together note by note. Doesn't sound as good as if I had just used stock beats from a pro, but I'm prouder for having done it myself. I'm a little surprised by how quickly I learned to program the tracks and put them together.

Listening to them now, they sound pretty cheesy. The sequencer was consumer-grade to begin with and is already showing its age, and the keyboard sounds literally remind me of the muzak they play in low-end Japanese department stores. But it brings back memories.

And now you can download them...absolutely free!!

Without You

I think this would actually be good enough to play as muzak in a quality 100-yen store.

Good Times in Machine Hell

The distorted piano is *supposed* to be an electric guitar doing power chords(the software didn't have a guitar sound worth a damn). If you squint your ears and pretend that's what it is it sounds a lot better. The horns, however, are actually just supposed to be horns. I was inspired by watching the band play on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Saliva

Longer than the others, but probably my favorite. The main piano is supposed to be an electric guitar, and the big chords are supposed to be guitar powerchords. The lead piano line is supposed to be the vocals.

Sarah Palin

2008-09-03T20:58:00.004+09:00

Boring to most people that read this blog and gets lousy traffic aside from a few liberals such as myself on the google prowl, but I've been following John McCain's VP pick Sarah Palin far too closely not to write something about it...

Conservative David Frum, in a rare moment of candor off official party line-

Maybe [the gamble picking Palin] will work. But maybe (and at least as likely) it will reinforce a theme that I'd be pounding home if I were the Obama campaign: that it's John McCain for all his white hair who represents the risky choice, while it is Barack Obama who offers cautious, steady, predictable governance.

That's the funny thing about all this. All through this campaign, McCain and Clinton before him have hammered home that Obama is a virtual unknown, inexperienced and therefore a risky, dubious choice for the highest office. As McCain's ads ask ominously, "He's a celebrity...but is he ready to lead?"

Its the one credible thing they can say about him in the face of his charisma. And for a while, it looked like it might work. McCain, if you don't pay attention to his policies, as most people don't, seems familiar and reassuringly boring. The kind of boring that makes for a safe choice. And the media didn't do anything to break that notion. Dazzled by Obama, they more or less left him alone all summer, which was for the best. McCain might not have gone up much in the polls, but all the while, Obama went down, until the two were even.

The Palin pick changes all that though. Its what I call a flail, when someone in a high stakes battle loses their poker face and reveals their true insecurity by making a dumb, desperate move. By making a transparently political lunge toward women and Clinton voters, they've robbed McCain of the one advantage he genuinely had in this race. How can you keep railing against Obama for lack of experience when you've just put a 20-month governor and long-time small-town mayor a literal heartbeat away from the presidency?

Just as badly, it shows off McCain's impulsiveness, and tendency to make snap decisions without thinking it through. McCain has frustrated his staff with last-minute changes that leave them hanging in the wind before, but most of it was under the radar and not noticeable to anyone but wonks. This move puts his unpredictability out where everyone can see it.

I think the McCain campaign assumed that no-one in the media would dare attack her because to do so would be "sexist". Long have they loathed political correctness, perhaps they thought they could make it work in their favor for once. But it was a very tone-deaf choice. Clinton is over 60 and comes across as a matriarch. Even her worst critics concede she's made of steel. There's nothing 'sexy' about her for a tabloid to claw at.

Palin is 44 and attractive. Have you ever known the media to go easy on an attractive woman with a list of bizzarre personal scandals? The media has already been ferocious on her, unearthing literally more scandals and rumors than I can count (not the least of which that her 17 year old daughter is pregnant, pretty bad for a abstinence advocate that cuts funds for sex education). Most damningly, US magazine is running a tabloid-style cover story on her entitled, "Babies, Lies and Scandal". She's getting the full Britney Spears/Lindsey Lohan coverage. Say what you want about how far we've come with equality, our society still places an enormous amount of scorn and ridicule on younger women that are less than perfect.

Palin is smart and talented politically. I have to say, despite her policies and behavior I can't help liking her when I see older interviews with her. She may turn out to be a good campaigner.

But I don't think she can get out of this. It's too much mud, coming too fast, with too little time left in this election to learn on the road and turn things around. Her scheduled appearance at the RNC yesterday was cancelled, signalling that McCain's camp doesn't know what to do. They can't even boot her, because by doing so they would have to admit that they didn't know what they were doing.

Obama, to his credit, has pointed out that his own mother was 18 when she had him, stated that candidates' families, especially their children, are off limits, and said unequivocally that if he thought anyone in his campaign was trying to dig up dirt Palin's teenage daughter he would fire them. Experienced running mate at his side, Looking more like the grown-up in this election than ever before, he contines to walk forward, closer and closer toward the White House.

Update- Just saw Palin's postponed speech at the RNC. Like I thought she might be, she's a great campaigner, certainly the highlight of their convention.

The base was riled up and Republicans are ecstatic. She played up the "maverick" image and made them out to be a Red Change team to counter Obama's blue one. Smart. And she definitely brings energy to the campaign. It'll be really interesting to see how it plays out in the polls. The dems will see a bite out of their lead for sure.

What I wrote earlier stands, though. Obama still looks steadier and more dependable. She's good, but it seems...risky. She was kind of mean-spirited with some of her digs at Obama, speaking with sarcasm and putting aside all that "my opponent is honorable but..." stuff thats been going back and forth between Obama and McCain. It has spunk, but the whole line of attack seems smaller. I don't know if that kind of thing will be enought to move swing voters.

Some Okinawa pictures

2008-09-03T20:04:00.004+09:00

No big narrative, just some random shots. Really nice trip, although my knees got sunburned to blackness.

Rented a scooter and drove around Zamami island, an hour speedboat south of Naha. Nice view.

Hitomi. She was also travelling alone, on a secret, more-or-less-unauthorized vacation from her soul crushing job in Saitama. We wound up hanging out the whole day.

Obscure American drinks like Dr.Pepper are popular in Okinawa, but I was having trouble finding it. Turns out I just didn't know what it looked like here. If you look closely, there's a standard Dr.Pepper can between her breasts.

The message of hope and change reverberates around the world- even in local Okinawan politics!

Once more, the beaches of Zamami. Sigh...I can't get back soon enough.

Awkward Moment

2008-08-29T20:55:00.005+09:00

I'm going to sound totally clueless with this, but anyway...

Mobile post. I'm in Okinawa now and hitch-hiked to Nago in the north. I got picked up by a really nice couple that used to be in the US military, and relocated to Okinawa. They were both black.

They were really friendly and we talked about the US election. The husband joked he would probably be tired of Obama in a year, but that he was willing to give him a chance over McCain. The wife said she wasn't too impressed with McCain's negative campaigning. "If all they can do is talk about why we *shouldnt* vote for Obama, they cant have much going on themselves." I agreed wholeheartedly.

Later, it turned out they were from Virginia, and I asked them if they liked the producer Timbaland, who's from there. The husband looked at his wife and said, "Oh yes, Allen Iverson is from Virginia too," the point being that I was bringing up black rappers and basketball players that happened to be from Virginia. He didn't sound angry or indignant or accusing, like he was making a mountain out of a molehill. Just...wary. Like he was seeing a routine begin to play out that he'd been through a million times before.

He was cool about it and didnt seem to mind, and we talked happily for the rest of the ride. But his wife seemed really ticked off that I had assumed they might know/like Timbaland, told me she liked Celine Dion, and put on her headphones and didnt talk to me much after that.

I felt so bad that it became a thing and put a distance between us. I just really like Timbaland. When I meet people from Minnesota I ask them if they like Garrison Keillor the same way. I see a lot of jokes about these "touchy subjects" on American TV, where someone says one thing and it gets taken as racial. But I assumed it was exaggeration.

Hip Hop in Japan

2008-08-26T20:44:00.003+09:00

Twitter style mobile post, waiting to get some paperwork done at the city hall. Theres an old man next to me wearing full hip hop regalia. big baggy black jeans with neon orange lining and bright yellow zippered cargo pockets. baggy black top with silver buttons and random straps stitched in front of the shoulders, black canvas ball hat and sneakers.

I dont think its a statement, he's probably just oblivious. They were probably just comfortable and on sale, and he decided he might as well get with the new trend.

The Audition

2008-08-26T18:04:00.001+09:00

Off topic, but just too good not to pass on. "The Audition" from Mr.Show- one of the funniest sketches I've seen in a long time.

Isn't that hilarious?

All you need to know about Joe Biden

2008-08-23T22:21:00.002+09:00

So Obama chose Joe Biden for VP on his ticket. It blows my mind that this guy could wind up being Dick Cheney's successor- in a good way.

Watching him here, he seems to be on the fringe of Washington as much as Dennis Kucinich. But now this guy could become part of the new establishment in the US? Even as just a 50/50 possibility...The times, they are a'changin.

Where do we find the time? A study of our cognitive surplus

2008-08-17T20:21:00.003+09:00

Ever put off work by editing a wikipedia entry, or writing a blog, and felt guilty for wasting your time? As it turns out you're not, or at least, not as much as you would have 20 years ago. I highly recommend watching this speech, here. Part 2 is in the sidebar. Or, read the transcript of his speech on his own blog.

There's a lot of mumbo-jumbo out there about the internet and web 2.0, but this guy does a very good job parsing exactly how online life really can change some things we do for the better.

Seal of Bike Parking Uncoolness

2008-08-15T14:25:00.005+09:00

Fukuoka is a modern Japanese city. Underground power lines in the new Areas, carefully tree-lined streets and big, spacious tiled sidewalks that put together are often wider than the roads between them. Its a big change from the weeds-growing out of cracks in the pavement you see elsewhere, and a quantum leap from the joyless, car-centric concrete abyss that is central Japan.

The only problem is that the people that pay the exorbitantly high taxes to make those things possible have an irritating habit of thinking they can make use of all that extra sidewalk space between the trees by putting their bikes there. Down at Takamiya station there's a square with a fountain, benches and reams of open space. They tolerate parking by the Macdonalds and Indian restaurant Parkesh (Which, being businesses, have to concern themselves with the practicality of shooing off customers), but if you try to park your bike in the big stretch of unused space under the staircase on the far end, they freak the hell out.

Fukuoka just doesn't know what to do. They hate bicycles parked on public property, but to tow them all would be to wage war on their own citizenry. Everybody in this country owns a bike, sometimes two. They could just impound everyone's bike I guess, but well, that just wouldn't be very nice.

So instead, they've hired a squadron of kindly senior citizens to wear authoritive-looking neon Jackets, to patrol grounds where people park their bikes and tell them to park in one of the pay zones. I parked my bike in Tenjin for 3 hours, and when I got back I found this sticker on it. It says "Bad form parking sticker" and an enthusiastic team of cartoon women wearing helmets with antennaed headsets named Chari Angels are covering it from all sides. The web address leads to here, where you can get more information on where you can pay to park.

Really Good Blog Writing Awards

2008-08-14T21:37:00.006+09:00

This blog has come up in conversation a bit lately, mostly in the form of whinging that I'm not updating much and that the posts have gotten mostly personal (true and true). Aside from the usual complaints, two other things come up- one, the general opinion is that its pretty well written, or "put together". And two, that I must spend a lot of time getting it to read that way.

Without any false modesty both opinions kind of surprised me, because I don't put much time into writing these entries at all. In fact, the whole appeal of starting the blog in the first place, and what's kept me going with it, is the complete lack of pressure to put effort into it. I've written for money under pressure before, and it doesn't make for a good hobby. Its certainly not something you can do un-selfconsciously in a half hour on a Wednesday night between other things. When you read Time Magazine or Slate, you can almost feel the writers agonizing over their little descriptions and turns of phrases. It takes enormously more time and personal pressure to write that way, but unless you happen to be William Faulkner or something, that sort of careful, self-conscious style actually doesn't do much to improve the writing. Exceptions can be made for true masters of course, but those people are few and far between. On the whole, as I get older I find I enjoy "proper Writing' less and less.

Thereau (sp?) said, "use whatever words you like, all you can say is who you are". True, so you might as well just cut the act and not let anything get in the way. I like blogging because it breaks down all the stiff, awkward little formalities that usually kill non-professional writing. Everyone has a story to tell, and at one point or another we all tell them. But when we go to write it down, we suddenly assume that what we want to say, using the tawdry words we use everyday, can't possibly be good enough. We have to go through with this little routine of dressing up what we have to say in little costumes it would normally never wear. And then when it sounds ridiculous as a result, we blame our ability to write, rather than our failure to just say what we're thinking as we normally sound. Blogs have given a venue for people of different walks of life to just tell their stories, without having to worry about anything but that.

Have blogs produced good writing? I think they have, though the type of writing that comes out of them is markedly different from what's normally considered good writing. Lots of italicized points, boldfaced fonts, and cutaways to quick, simulated dialogue. Long rambling pieces and others that can screech to a halt. Here are some examples of what I think is really good blog writing. These examples bump and jag along in ways that editors work their hardest to flatten out and tame, and none would have stood a prayer of getting into a conventional magazine in their current forms. But I think they're really well written, and rank as some of the best stuff I've read over the past year.

Pride and Palpitations, by LowerManhattanite, a black man watching TV in amazement as Obama speaks after winning the Iowa caucus. This guy is a phenomenal writer. I'm put to shame just thinking about how good he is.

Farm Fetish John Rogers gets really sick of hearing about what heartland America thinks.

From Start-up to Bust-up A survivor of the dot.com boom explains how venture capitalists ruined a perfectly profitable start-up (long).

I wrote Donkey Kong A former Atari programmer explains how he ported one of the day's most popular games to the system. A good read even if you don't know or care about programming.

As a contrast- The author of that last piece is actually an avid reader, and seemed embarrassed that the above post attracted so much attention. He stalled on writing more about Atari, because he said he didn't just want to dash off a factual account, and wanted to instead write about it properly. The end result was this, which for all the effort in my opinion just isn't as interesting to read.

Baseball Game

2008-07-29T11:14:00.004+09:00

Went to a baseball game with Kayne the other night. Neither of us know or care much about baseball, but we had never been, so we just wanted to go for the experience. My Japanese teacher had told me that it was a really good time, because the crowd gets so into it. And if the home team wins, fireworks go off!

Details were pretty blurry. Mostly we just got drunk and talked about unrelated stuff surrounded by the ambience of 30,000 shrieking Japanese baseball fans. We we spilled a beer that leaked down to the seats below us, which didn't do much to ingratiate us to the surrounding audience. But from what I gathered through the haze, the Fukuoka team, the Softbank Hawks, were playing the Hokkaido team, the Japan Ham Falcons (Back home the say, Toronto team is known as the Toronto Blue Jays. Here, they're known by the companies that own/sponsor them, which if you ask me is just a wee bit crass. I mean seriously, how much fear does the name "Japan Ham Fighters" strike in your heart? Good thing they weren't bought by Huggies Diapers. Now that would really be a drag).

This much I do know- Fukuoka was getting its ass kicked, literally 9-0 6 or 7 innings in. No fireworks tonight. Many fans started to leave, and Kayne took the opportunity to go to the bathroom, thereby missing the two most memorable events of the night.

I was typing a mail on my phone when I felt something speed past my knee. Someone had chucked a beer can through the crowd and it had landed in the aisle. The guy in front of me was standing up, and locking eyes with a younger guy about 4 seats over, who had apparently chucked the can. Then they ran into each other and started to shove. The guy in front of them moved in to break it up, and the first guy left.

I have no clue what it was about. The only thing I can think of was that guy 1 was leaving because the Hawks were losing, and guy 2 chucked the can at him out of disgust for his disloyalty. I have no idea what set him off. Hell, maybe he was aiming at me. At any rate, for the rest of the game the beer chucker just stared straight ahead at the field, wrestling with his inner demons and anger issues.

And then, as if to appease the home crowd for their dissappointment and frustration, the Hawks knocked the ball into the bleachers for a home run. Some lucky fan a few aisles over caught it, and everyone on my side let go of their balloons and sent them shooting through the air.

Unrelated "productive summer" update- started the Japanese lessons, doing swimming, getting office by Bike, but not as often as I'd like. Yesterday I was there from 2 til 10 last night and didn't get home til 11. I'm starting to realize I could use 2 summers to do everything I could be doing in terms of research. Actually feeling some pressure to get it all done.

School's Out

2008-07-22T10:18:00.005+09:00

Today marks my first summer of paid summer vacation. Next term doesn't start up until mid-September, giving me just under 2 months.

You'd think having that much time off would be incredible, but its amazing how quickly it can pass if you get lazy. Having a lot of unstructured time is difficult to manage if you don't have any fixed responsibilities or places to be. You imagine all the fun/productive things you can do, but start off by spending a few days just kicking around, and next thing you know it's over.

I'm determined to master the art of using a huge chunk of free time productively. Phil Greenspun in the right-hand blog roll, made millions with an internet start-up and found that semi-retirement was actually difficult to manage. He recommended listing off things you plan to do over the free time in a blog, so as to publically shame yourself if you don't do it (actually he advocated blogging daily reports, so that you'd want something to show for yourself each day. But even I can't keep a blog as boring as that). So anyway, as a one-time thing to mark the beginning of the season, here's my list of stuff I want to get done over the summer.

-Testing class at Temple. 7 hours a week, meets Fridays and Saturdays. Should go on until mid-August.

-Japanese lessons. Want at least 10 90-minute meetings between now and September. Will meet Mondays and Wednesdays, starting tomorrow. I want some solid goals on studying for the Level 2 proficiency test in November. (Just realized I need to sign up to take the test by the end of August).

-Get whatever homework that class requires done.

-Go to the gym and/or swimming at least twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays before the Japanese lessons.

-Mark 100 active vocabulary tests by hand, collect results from my two co-writers, then work out inter-rater reliability.

-Scan the several hundred tests I collected over the semester, do rasch analysis on all of them, check internal reliability

-Re-submit my paper for publication.

-Get presentation I'm doing with Nick in Tokyo in November ready. Scan zillions of student surveys.

-Work out master wordlist for next semester.

-Prepare semester's homework schedule for all my classes. Put Audio online. Work out pre-tests.

-Meet with P and work out curriculum for CALL class I'll (probably) be doing with Nick next year.

-Make a point of going into the office to get all the above work done, so as not to get distracted at home.

-Make a point of biking into the office (a 45 minute trip) every day for the exercise.

Finally-

Take a one-way plane trip to Taiwan. Stay a couple days, then take the Ferry to the southernmost Okinawa island, and slowly weave my way up north and back to Kyushu via boats, hitting up as many islands as possible. Hitchhike across the islands if necessary.

Doing that will ideally take a couple weeks. So I'll have to buckle down and get everything else done soon in order to have time for that.

A free alternative to Parallels just came out for Mac

2008-07-20T08:03:00.004+09:00

The more I have to do, the less I have to talk about on this blog. Missed Kayne's return party last night because I had to get ready for a presentation I'm giving at Colloquium here in Fukuoka today. From the looks of it I'll be pretty busy over the summer even without any classes to teach.

Anyway, if you have an intel Mac, but haven't gotten around to installing Parallels for it yet, a free alternative just came out that seems to be identical, Virtual Box from Sun. Here's a video demonstrating it and showing how to install it.

I know a lot of people with Macs that have been interested in Parallels, but just couldn't be bothered to buy it. But if you can download it now for free...why not? It also supports Linux OSs like Ubuntu, so it might even let you run Windows XP copies before service Pack 2, which would be a huge improvement over what Bootcamp demands.

The iPhone Hits Japan

2008-07-12T07:16:00.006+09:00

iPhone came to Japan yesterday. I walked by Yodobashi Camera around 7:20 AM, and there was already a line. In Tokyo, the line at one outlet numbered 1500 people at one point.

Pretty typical for iPhone launches around the world, I guess. But the surprise here is that many people didn't believe that an American product could be so popular here. Japan is the birthplace of the modern cell-phone. Phones have had POP3 email addresses since the late 90's, Cameras since 2000 and video-conferencing since 2001. These days, nearly every phone you can pick up for $50 with a short contract already has a music player, and cell phones with TV tuners and wide screens that can flip to landscape mode are becoming common.

But in some ways, the iphone is more Japanese than the Japanese offerings. Its a slick, stylish device that beats Japan at its own game, which is actually pretty worrying for the electronic industry here.

The media has shown a lot of excitement, and the response has been strong. I know someone who went to 7 locations and couldn't find one, all sold out. The shortage might be manufactured to create hype, but the lines aren't.

I want to spend half my year in Thailand

2008-07-07T18:39:00.009+09:00

When I left Thailand to move to Japan I felt some regret. For a while I had this fantasy about spending winters in Thailand and spring/summer in Japan, but of course that just wasn't practical. Where are you going to find places that will employ you for half the year?

4 years later though, I have my answer to that rhetorical question- Universities will. I get 5 months vacation with my current job, 3 in the middle of winter (January, February, March), and two in Summer (mid-july to mid-september).

This summer is the middle of the term and I have a lot of stuff to do. But why not spend an extended period in Thailand over the winter? I can bring my laptop and books, work mornings, and relax afternoons and evenings. I can stay in touch with everyone for work via email.

I emailed Kevin today for advice on where I can get a good one or two month lease on a good place with air conditioning, satellite TV, a pool and all that, and he got back to me with a bunch of suggestions. I'm gonna make this work damn it!

EDIT- Okay, here's where I'm thinking of staying. About $425 for the month-

Details here.

Has cable, 21" TV (Normally I don't watch much TV, but in Thailand they get BBC, HBO and other stuff that's nowhere to be found in Japan), Wireless internet. No pool, which sucks. But they have a "Fitness room".

Or I can get a bigger room which is more or less a full-size apartment with a much larger living room and a kitchen and dining room, but its like $750, which is getting kind of steep. I could use the money I'd save on the cheaper room to eat out every night.

Osaka

2008-07-06T11:19:00.003+09:00

When I started this blog I decided I was going to keep my work life out of it. Only problem? These days my whole life is my work life, and so I have nothing to write about. For the sake of doing a new entry I'll make an exception.

I've been doing a lot of presentations and conferences lately. Yesterday I got on the bullet train early in the morning and went 600km out to Osaka to give a half hour presentation. I noticed that one of the other presenters was a novelist who had a book based in Japan out a few years back on HarperCollins, and I was really curious to meet him. After my presentation he came up and introduced himself and told me how much he liked it. It turns out he's doing the same kind of research, and is getting his Phd from a University in New Zealand (I think I might apply for the same program).

He told me about getting published. Apparently the director of the Bourne Identity/Ultimatum movies optioned the rights to it, and he has another one in the pipes. He's getting on with his day job in the meantime, but what a cool side job. One of these days I want to write a childrens' book, so it was really interesting to hear. It was actually kind of weird how much we had in common.

I had to get back to Fukuoka, but it seemed like a shame to trek all the way back so soon so I stayed for the afterparty. It turned out that one of the guys in my audience who kept firing off questions and comments was the director of the program at the university the conference was held at, and during the party asked me if I wanted a job there! It turns out he uses the conference as a bit of a scouting ground. Nothing official of course, but he gave me his card, told me to send my resume, said he was interested etc. I'm happy where I am, but still, nice to know I'm appreciated.

Then to top it all off, that night I got acceptance letters for not one, but two different presentations at a national conference in Tokyo this fall, one solo and one with Nick. I get 2 months vacation for summer, but at this rate, between the research I'm doing and the Japanese and Testing classes I'm taking, I'll basically be working full time throughout the break.

Girl Talk's new album Feed the Animals out for any price you're willing to pay

2008-06-20T20:14:00.006+09:00

It seems like most of the music I listen to these days isn't even commercially available. One of my favorite albums of the past year has been Night Ripper, by the Pittsburgh DJ Girl Talk. He mixes hundreds of snippets of other people's songs into 40 minute albums, creating a hyper-concentrated, somewhat ADD-addled form of music. The samples on Night Ripper were, of course, completely uncleared, and had he paid all the related fees, may well have cost several million dollars to release. Consequently it pretty much existed only on the internet via downloads.

Still unable to release his music properly, I guess GT and his indie label Illegal Art decided that if people were going to download it, they might as well get the option to pay if they want to. Like Radiohead's In Rainbows, Girl Talk's new album Feed the Animals is available for download for any price you're willing to pay, including $.0.00.

I paid $10.00 myself. People talk about this model as a gimmick, but the sad truth is that if an artist averages more than a dollar per download with this method, they'll already be earning more than the major label system is willing to pay them for unit. And unlike a major label deal, which means handing over the copyrights of any songs you write under contract over to the company permanently, if you distribute your music this way, you can actually keep ownership of your own songs.

It's ridiculous that this cyber-panhandling is a better deal for artists than what enormous multi-national corporations will pay for the same work. But that's what its come too. So if independent releases like this become the future for many new artists, the labels will have no-one but themselves to blame. They dug their own graves.

Bonus true story: Girl Talk is a DJ from Pittsburgh that used to work for a Biomedical company. He kept is DJing secret from his more conservative co-workers, but as his career took off, he found himself flying across the country each weekend and arriving back home late Sunday night, or even early Monday morning, exhausted. It started to develop into a secret double life, and as his fame grew people like Paris Hilton began coming on stage to dance, and he was landing magazine covers. But by then he was in too deep, and it just would have been too much too explain out of nowhere. When his weekend earnings began to outstrip his salary, he left his job to pursue music full time, without ever telling them.

Grad Photos

2008-06-17T18:47:00.007+09:00

Graduation Ceremony for Temple University, Japan Campus, 2008. Finished my credits a while back, but this was the big night. I was basically in and out of Tokyo, had to leave to get back to Fukuoka an hour after the cocktail party started. Good to get down, though. Here's a couple photos with Stella and Mitsuyo. We scaled the stage after everyone cleared out of the main room.

At first I wanted a shot with us throwing our caps up, so the shot had them frozen mid-air. That would have been messy so we went for looking like we were just about to throw them. I think Mitsuyo thought we were supposed to thrown them horizontally!

There was a family taking a pictures of their own below the stage when we took this. They got a kick out of it and just kept taking shots of their own while I was up there. So I'll forever more be in the upper background of their own graduation pictures. Years from now, people will be looking through pictures of their mom's/aunt's/cousin's graduation and go, "who the hell is that guy?"

Blue Hawaii Pepsi (Pineapple and Lemon flavor)

2008-06-14T07:39:00.008+09:00

Just picked it up, so far as I know only available in Japan.

Going down it just tastes like bland cola. Then there's a strong kickback of pineapple flavor, sharp to the point of being sour. They really could have tweaked the amount they used; it's too strong and drowns out everything else.

Finally, it leaves you with a nice aftertaste not unlike malibu coconut rum. I kept thinking that while its not that great a drink, it might make a good mixer. Then I remembered people used to mix malibu rum with coke and pepsi back in high school. Maybe the malibu rum has a little pineapple flavoring too, or this has a bit of coconut.

So in conclusion, cola and pineapple can mix okay, so long as the pineapple taste isn't too strong, as it is here. And at any rate these combinations just aren't as good if you're not getting drunk.

Headed to Tokyo tonight, I officially graduate from TUJ tomorrow in an official cap and gown ceremony. Sounds fun, except I'm sick and hacking up unpleasant stuff today. Hope it wears off by tonight.

Me on Markov

2008-06-13T22:18:00.006+09:00

Today's guest blogger is the Markov Text Synthesizer. I fed a years' worth of my posts to it and told it to imitate my writing. This is what it came up with.

Just got word from the built-in-robot, which can understand your questions. It's also supposed to be trying to Willie Hortonize Rudy Giuliani. And thereby hangs a tale — the cost of a testing center for foreigners learning Japanese?" I wondered. Then I saw in Tokyo It's hard to swallow. If R.Kelly and is sleeping with 14 year old girls and Gary Glitter is molesting prepubescent ones, this still makes McCartney look pretty lacking. Check out some good analysis on the market. But look at their own (Also see here). They might be the only reason she looks like a sore thumb amongst all the Republican Candidates combined. Even Clinton got more time now, so here it is. I was thinking about buying it, they were stolen goods. Check out these details- A big conference is in Japan Welcome to Tokyo. I've been through this routine before. It's insane. How is this even legal? If Amtrak pushed people into trains this way the ipod has in its current, bare-bones incarnation, is it basically said 0% Juice/Natural Flavor, so apparently there isn't even really legal. See where this info and the prospect of hitch-hiking like I didn't really know what you're up to.

Today's guest blogger is the custom in Japan is sliding in electronics, but when it turns out he was in violation of the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm moving on I'd just stand there awkwardly waiting for it this year. Prefectural police suspect that those negative moments only come out of touch with my sister Ali over the phone with a situation where literally millions of dollars. I was 18 back in Canada around 2000. We moved to a known developer. While this album would have made those songs would probably be charged with basic household needs at least I got used to be. If he stopped doing those he wouldn't have taken a new Casio too, she said, popping into the political right, climate change skeptics seem to like tearing stars down just as bad if not more, than most jobs though. You're up in finding the downtime. At work I gaze at it, the water is under the blanket with the benefit of hindsight, governed very well. But the ipod touch finally reached Fukuoka. The Apple store was so eager to reach out by pointing out that as a Personal Blog...you know, photos of my hill. What is your hobby, the thing you can see actual film footage of him yelling is just as hard to fake,” Professor Provine figure that the Simon character is living a dream of an attempt to expand out. It was actually a very brief flash of disappointment.

Most of the stuff I generated kind of came out like the conversation of someone who has just gotten really, really high; second by second, it seems to make sense and go somewhere, but soon you realize there's no point to it.

One thing that's interesting is that although it can't make sense, it does do a reasonably good job simulating English grammar, and coming up with words that fit the one that came before it, and its doing that on a pretty limited corpus.

fun fact- This entire blog totals 110,000 words, or 378 pages, including spaces and breaks between paragraphs.

7 Dead, 11 injured in killing spree in Akihabara, Tokyo

2008-06-09T18:19:00.002+09:00

Just got word from Kevin. A crazy guy decided he was tired of life and that he would kill people. Drove to Akihabara, the geek/tech district of Tokyo, and drove his rented truck through the crowd. Then he jumped out with a knife and started stabbing people. Details here.

This is Japan's answer to Virginia Tech, but you'll notice when it happens here, its never with guns, because the laws are so strict. As a result, these types of killings are quite rare, simply because its difficult to pull them off. 7 years ago, a crazy man went to an Elementary School to stab children. He had to resort to that act of cowardice, because if he had tried to bring a knife to a high school or University, he would have had the living shit beat out of him.

So while its true that its people that kill people, and not guns...not having them around does reduce the possible damage.

Book Review: "Dreams From My Father" by Barack Obama

2008-06-08T11:40:00.005+09:00

The automatic reaction I get to books written by Politicians, or even by celebrities and media figures in general, is hastily-assembled, usually ghost written cash-cows, designed to promote the image and agenda of the brand name listed as the author. The kind of thing that shoots up the bestseller list for a short time like a weed, then shortly after, like a bad fad, drops unceremoniously into the discount bin of things time has forgotten.

While that's a harsh caricature, and while its likely one of the best written books of its kind, arguably it's still possible that Obama's latest book, The Audacity of Hope, while winning awards at the moment, could still wind up meeting that description. Its the book of a Senator, a man of such prominence that he has to choose every word he says publically very carefully, and as a result winds up saying not much of anything at all. It spells out his political positions with the utmost of care, glossing over so many edges and skipping around so many potentially controversial snags that it can't help seem a little glib and empty. Only the safest of topics, such as taking care of his daughters after their school day, seemed to come from the heart, and thats just not enough to hold a book together. I came away from it feeling like I didn't really know Obama all that much better for having had read it. And to an extent, it was likely designed to read that way. Such is the reality of writing a memoir in the midst of a heated, often dirty political campaign.

Obama's older book, the 1994 memoir Dreams From My Father, is a different beast altogether. It is, like it or not, a real book, the product of a real writer. A reflection on race relations and conflicts of growing up bi-racial in America, It was written when Obama was 33, in the aftermath of momentary fame he generated as the first African-American Editor of the Harvard Law Review. Until that point, Obama's only professional experience aside from law school was a short-lived job as a legal writer in New York, and a low-paying job as a community organizer in Chicago that he had taken in a fit of idealism.

It was in this book that Obama confessed his experiments with drugs in high school and college. When I first heard that revelation, I assumed that Obama had released the information as a form of pre-emptive damage control, to bring all his skeletons out of the closet early on, so that they would already be old news when he ran for office in the future. But reading the dark Dreams From My Father, it becomes difficult to believe it could possibly have been written in the name of political ambition. Indeed, its most fervent readers have been Right-Wing bloggers, mining it for the most incendiary, Jeremiah Wright-esque sentiments they can find. And as much as Obama balances those types of opinions intellectually and looks toward common ground even as he broods, there are plenty.

But the real surprise for me is that Obama is an honest to God writer. To an impressive extent, I found myself hanging to the narrative, relishing the author's droll wit and internal conflicts in a way that reached beyond just trying to unlock the public figure behind the typewriter. It stopped being political homework and became a real read. Even the right wing bloggers that have parsed it have admitted it works as a book. Academic Racist Steve Sailer begrudgingly compares Obama to Evelyn Waugh, focusing his attacks on the idea that while Obama might be a talented writer, those same traits won't make for a good leader. Even the Republican-funded smear site Stop Obama, hell-bent on blocking his ascendancy, stops the attacks momentarily to comment that "Judging by its reviews, critics obviously don’t read it to its sensational finale...it is far more interesting and more engrossing than Audacity of Hope".

The main thing I picked up from it? Just how much his background differs from the typical mainstream "elite" political candidate. Most elite politcians follow the fast-track from a very early age, moving from college to law school to small but prestigious political appointments in Washington. While Obama did eventually go to Harvard to enter that track, he spent his entire 20's doing the little things in Chicago, working at a non-profit trying to organize neighborhoods to do things like rid the pipes of asbestos, and fight the general apathy and cynicism that prevented people from even seeing the hope in trying to organize. He even worked for a Ralph Nader-affiliated organization for a time.

Much of the book details the frustrations of his early career, of trying to convince people to show up at town hall meetings and that it wouldn't just be a waste of their time. To bring together the blacks and whites of the city, so used to sparring, for the good of a common cause. The sort of low-level conflict and frustration that most of us, set in better paying but less idealistic careers, just don't have to worry about.

Given this background, is it any wonder that his campaign showed so much prowess generating small contributions and local grassroots support using a bottom-up, grassroots campaign? Clinton wasted 30 million on far worse results because her campaign was run the way a corporation markets a product (literally, if you look at the micro-trend Mark Penn-types running the show. They count those corps as clients).

Suddenly, it becomes clear why Obama ran such a good campaign, why he seems so good at generating consensus among diverse groups, why he seems so good at inspiring hope in changing the system among people that usually don't see the point in trying. Because years ago, before there was any obvious political or financial benefit to doing it, he was out in the trenches learning how.

People scoff at Obama's experience as a "community organizer", and even his time in the Illinois senate. Next to the pasts of Clinton and McCain, this experience seems so inconsequential. But up closer, this and his previous work experience begins to look like something else- the work of a man involved face-to-face with the very constituency he purports to serve. A man practicing a grassroots form of politics that lacks the glamor and prestige that attracts so many of the wrong types of people to the work. A form of politics so far removed from channels of real power that its difficult to be swayed early in your career by big lobbyists and PACS simply because so few of them could care less about anything you could do anyway.

And in that frame, Obama's inexperience up until the age of 33 looks like something else altogether. A politically inconvenient memoir, a string of non-profit jobs that paid as little as 10,000 a year out in Chicago...it's a very different 20's from the one Hillary Clinton had, or George Bush had. It's the kind of 20's you see in the sort of person that really cares about what they do, and really wants to see a change.

Bonus- Video of Obama talking to the young staff that got him elected shortly after clinching the nomination. 13 minutes, but if you watch it all, you'll get a good sense of how he managed to build and inspire such a strong base of volunteers.

Fukuoka woman lived in guy's closet for a year without him knowing

2008-05-30T20:45:00.002+09:00

A woman has been arrested in Japan for sneaking into a man's house and living in his closet without him knowing.

The guy got suspicious after food started going missing from the fridge and installed security cameras, catching her on tape and proving once and for all to his friends and family that he wasn't an insane paranoiac.

Japan is running out of Engineers

2008-05-17T14:31:00.002+09:00

Since the bubble burst in the early 90's, people have been fearful of the instability of the economy here, and been pushing their kids even further to make them competitive in the modern workplace.

Japanese parent's needn't worry though, because Japan's single greatest woe is a depleting workforce. That spells trouble for the country as a whole...but on the bright side, if you're a young native Japanese with an education looking for a job, the future actually looks quite good. The country makes so many exports that the economy is larger than the domestic work force. In the past, there were so many people that everything was competitive. These days, minimal qualifications make you very, very hireable.

For example, Japan now faces a serious shortage of engineers to power its high tech economy. Young engineering grads are reporting that they don't need to go find jobs, because jobs find them, and come with cushy sign-on incentives. Companies like Panasonic are even doing the unthinkable, and hiring foreign engineers. But the preference will always be for native Japanese employees.

Graduation Day

2008-05-15T11:25:00.003+09:00

Playing catch-up with all kinds of pictures and other stuff from the past few months. Still have a Yakushima trip to upload. Here's graduation at the trade college I used to work at from late March. These girls saw big jumps in their English ability in their first year, about a 100 point increase on the TOEIC test, average. Most university ESL programs would love to boast that kind of success rate.

Reminds me of a student I saw there a year after my last class with him. He was the lowest level student there, and basically seemed to be coming just to fill in time after high school, as is the custom in Japan (you're expected to have some schooling after high school in Japan...there's even a dog-walkers college). He slept through a lot of classes, and didn't come much. The unwritten rule was if his attendance was at a certain rate, he would be passed through the system with a C. The day of the exam he didn't come. Another student called him, and it turned out he was still in bed and forgot all about it. We had to wait 45 minutes to start for him to come in (Try doing that at the university I work at now...hah!)

Anyway, here's the point- his homeroom teacher had always been very concerned about him and very kind to him, and always invited him to come into the staffroom and chat. He hung out a lot and enjoyed our company and got a kick out of us, even if he never actually spoke English. I remember when I sang at the school Karaoke festival...he might not have woke up for the exam, but you can be sure he showed up bright and early to see that.

His English slowly began to get better as he began to pay moderately more attention in class, and he broke out of the typical apathy you often see among low level students here that don't see a real future for themselves anyway and just give up without trying. He began to participate in activities more. That summer, under encouragement, he went to New Zealand for 3 months.

When I talked to him at Graduation, we talked entirely in smooth, comfortable English. It was like meeting and talking to a different person. I was so proud of him, and amazed at how things had changed in the two years.

The moral? As educators, we focus so much on teaching strategies, and devote hundreds of hours to researching, say, whether or not a certain method of learning vocabulary has any statistically significant advantage, however slight, over a somewhat different method. We pursue careers sorting out these things. And yet, so often, the most meaningful and important gains we see among our students spring ultimately from our relationships with them.

An Open Letter to Obama critic Steve Sailer

2008-05-11T21:57:00.005+09:00

If you're not aware of who he is, Steve Sailer is a conservative, Academically-racist writer for a variety of conservative publications (Think lesser versions of the National Review, such as American Conservative). Most of his writing, to one degree or another, focuses on race and IQ. In a recent column for example, he argued that blacks prefer basketball to golf because it is less cognitively demanding. It could just be me and my inability to parse through all that he writes, but his more controversial articles seem to not turn up when I search for them months later. Perhaps he thinks better of it and takes them down?

Anyway, as you can imagine, Sailer has been having a field day writing about the presumptive Democrat nominee, Barack Obama. In particular, he pores over Obama's first book, the racially-charged memoir Dreams From My Father, in nearly obesessive detail. The quotes and synopses are so extensive it's a good way to read Obama's story for free, actually.

In the past few months he has come at Obama in his pondering, slow to the point way from almost every conceivable angle, save actual analysis of his policies. I can't be bothered to search through it and link to it all right now, but here's a fairly typical recent column. I've tuned in to his work in bemused curiousity off and on since college, but never seen him so fixated on a single person, yet so at a loss to articulate his concerns. I've begun to get a little worried about him, and thought I'd write him something.

Steve-

While you've been mining Dreams from my Father for a while, the focus of your criticisms seems to have shifted somewhat.

In the past, the implication seemed to be that underneath the veneer, Obama was essentially an angry black man, and that if put in a position of power, he would betray the whites he reached out to by "letting the black people do whatever they wanted".

Now, perhaps sensing that this kind of angle doesn't work quite as well in America as it used to, or just by fear of the "scarlet R" (as you phrase it), you've shifted to using the book as a testament to Obama's underlying emotional instability, as if it reveals him to be a person of dangerously strong mood swings, liable to crack under pressure.

I doubt this will work for you, or anyone you care to pass your ideas on to. First of all, Obama has made it clear that while he still stands by the overall message of the book, and is well aware that it will be mined for political reasons by people such as yourself, the voice is that of a much younger man, and no longer his. This may be difficult for you to understand, but many might well see his willingness both to deal with those important and charged issues of race in America as a young man and apparently move past them as an adult a sign of maturity, not weakness.

Second, given the events of the past few months, you'll have a hard time convincing anyone that Obama is prone to emotional swings. He has suffered several scandals recently, any one of which would have finished off a lesser man. Throughout it all, he has been unflappable, and as May 6th has shown us, unscathed. Even FOX's Chris Wallace, drilling him with the toughest questions Rove could muster, could not raise his ire or pin him into a vulnerable position.

In a way, its reassuring to see people like yourself grab at these disparate, occasionally contradicting narratives in attempts to frame Obama negatively. He is both an empty suit, and a liberal with bold, dangerous ideas. Both a teflon politician who has mastered the art of skillfully saying nothing, and an angry black liable to hurt America with profoundly radical thinking. Both a snobbish elitist and drug-using, basketball-loving minority. Both a hippy fantasizer that believes everyone can just get along, and, in the opinion of a National Review columnist, a man who shows a profoundly paranoid "us vs. them" mentality. But even with all that has been written, you have yet to find your silver bullet. And worse still, contradicted by what came before, each new tack seems less convincing and on the mark than the last.

Its grabbing at straws. It shows you don't really understand what you're up against, or just how formidable an opponent he really is. While I wasn't so sure 6 months ago, I'm beginning to suspect he will make short work of you and people like you this year.

Train Stuffing in Japan

2008-05-10T13:58:00.002+09:00

Welcome to Tokyo. I've been through this routine before. It's insane.

How is this even legal? If Amtrak pushed people into trains this way they would be sued by travellers, and probably arrested for some kind of health or fire code violation. If the UN packed refugees in a train this way the organizers would probably be charged with basic human rights violations, and rightfully so.

And yet millions pay to travel this way in Tokyo every day.

Why does everyone that comes here browse with Firefox and own a Mac?

2008-05-10T12:24:00.003+09:00

My browser of choice, Firefox, now has 13% market share worldwide up from a miniscule 5% or so just a few short years ago. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, still the champ, has about 76%.

Yet when I check stats for this blog, an awful lot of people seem to be running Firefox. For example, As of noon today, I've had around 310 visitors according to google analytics, give or take a few hours. The breakdown is as follows:

Browsers

1. Firefox / Windows 45.16%
2. Internet Explorer / Windows 17.10%
3. Safari / Macintosh 12.90%
4. Firefox / Macintosh 10.32%
5. Firefox / Linux 6.45%
6. Opera / Windows 2.90%
7. Mozilla / Windows 1.29%
8. Safari / iPhone 1.29%
9. Mozilla / Linux 0.97%
10. Opera / Linux 0.65%

The dominant browser by far is Mozilla Firefox, with about 60% market share across all platforms. Explorer is reduced to 17.

While the numbers don't differ as dramatically, the number of people that visit here with macs is out of proportion too. Worldwide, Macs make up just a little over 7% of all computers, though this fingure is climbing at a surprisingly fast rate. PC's running windows make up around 92% of the market, although I've seen recent figures that see the number hitting 89% as Mac sales take off and small linux micro-notebooks (currently clogging the top seller list on amazon) dilute the market. But look at the stats for today-

Windows- 66.45%
Mac- 23.87%
Linux- 8.06%
iphone- 1.29%
ipod- 0.32%

That's a bit over triple what the rate for mac users should be.

Now, it's true that in the past few months I've blogged a fair bit about Apple, and even did a post about Firefox add-ons, and that could help bring in those visitors. But I actually noticed this trend long before I even owned a Mac, particularly wanted on myself, or even breathed a word about what browser I use.

It makes me think about demographics. Why are people that browse a Japan blog more likely to be using a given browser or computer, details that you would expect to be completely irrelevant? If Firefox and Mac continue to grow in popularity and marketshare, does that make groups of people that already use them to disproportionately high degrees trend-setters, and a bellweather of the software and technology the majority will be using down the road?

Not that there's anything particularly trend setting about this blog, but in a way it probably does. Just by having google reader and having a tendency to stumble onto blogs of any kind, an internet surfer is already somewhat more involved with computers than the average person, who usually just uses internet explorer as the default that their PC came with, without even thinking about what could be better. If you want to see what software and computers the general public will be using in a few years, take a look at what the people who already pay a lot of attention to these types of issues are starting to use.

The Macbook- Thin enough

2008-05-10T12:06:00.003+09:00

The Macbook Air- Very thin.

The Macbook- Thin Enough.

Why do Rich People like "30 Rock" so much?

2008-05-10T09:05:00.005+09:00

A few months ago I started watching 30 Rock, the screwball sitcom on NBC starring former Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey. The show is based on her days at SNL. She plays a producer/head writer for a live prime time comedy show on NBC, and most of the plot focuses on her dealings with her boss and her employees in the writer's room. Fey says that while the ridiculous plots are obviously made up, in terms of the relationships between the people working on the show and the way they behave go, it's more or less the same as SNL.

I enjoy it more than any sitcom I've seen in years, and right now it's the only TV show I watch regularly aside from the Daily Show. I did a google search to see if everyone back home liked it as much as I did, and found to my surprise that despite winning Emmys, the show's ratings are dismal, and at last count the show ranked somewhere around #113 in the ratings.

So why does NBC keep it alive? Much for the same reason that my other favorite TV show, the Daily Show, manages to attract every major presidential candidate despite having ratings nearly one third of their competition- demographics. These days, when sponsors look for shows to put ads on, it's not so much how many people watching that counts, it's who.

Apparently, 30 Rock is one of the more popular TV shows among affluent viewers, coming in at #11 last year (other NBC shows, such as Scrubs and The Office, see similar large boosts in popularity among the wealthy). More recently, among the very wealthy, it has begun to do even better still. It is now the second most popular TV show among people with incomes of $100,000 a year or higher.

Television is filled with rich characters. Every soap opera ever made features the young and beautiful wives and children of millionaires and billionaires. Shows like Gossip Girl more or less exist to detail their privileged lives. So why is it that if you actually are rich, you're statistically far more likely to be watching general ratings losers like 30 Rock? Here are some possible reasons-

Rich People Tend to Prefer Workplace Comedies

This also explains the popularity of The Office and Scrubs among this demographic- all 3 of these shows are workplace comedies. The truth is, most people that earn over 100,000 a year have great portions of their lives taken up by work. So they're more likely to relate to shows that focus on workplace comedy. While I haven't seen the data, I suspect that 20 years ago Murphy Brown saw similar trends.

That accounts for The Office, too. But while that shows general ratings are also respectable, 30 Rock skyrockets to number 2 all the way down from the prime time basement. I think there are other factors that account for its own jump. Namely-

30 Rock might be the only show on television that tells the story of a person in management sympathetically.

This may not be obvious at first, but 30 Rock details that plight and stress sources of people in management more than any show I've ever seen. Most shows, if they deal with workplace issues at all, treat bosses as objects of fear or ridicule. Consider some of the jokes on 30 Rock-

-The writers shirk in fear as Liz Lemon pitches a fit because her sandwich is missing.

-Lemon faces a dilemma when she realizes that the girlfriend of the guy she likes ranks among her 200+ employees, and that with cutbacks on the way, she now has the power to fire her.

-During contract negotiations, she becomes so angered at one of her cast members that she forces him to do the worm in order to keep his job.

-After putting him down in front of everyone else, Liz overhears a writer calling her a cunt. For the rest of the episode, she stews over whether or not she should fire him, while other people try to get her to calm down and not over-react.

Now to be sure, these were all just jokes, and the stories were written in such a way that as viewers, we see things through Lemon's eyes and sympathize with her actions. But how many other shows do you know that even approach that type of humor? And if you managed several people yourself, where else on TV could you go to find humor that relates to those types of situations from your side?

The show offers a form of realistic escapism.

One reason people like fiction is so they can imagine themselves leading a better or more exciting life. For most people, that makes shows like The Hills popular- if you're young and catty, in terms of the gossip and conflicts, it's like your own life in many ways, only more dramatic and interesting, and everyone is richer and better looking.

Does Tina Fey's character Liz Lemon provide that type of escapism? At first glance, Liz Lemon looks just as downtrodden and disheveled as any character on The Office. But underneath the insecurities that make her a sympathizable character, Lemon actually has quite a good life. She lives in Manhattan with a great job as executive producer on a highly-rated prime time TV show. That's not to say that her character is anywhere near as privileged or has things anywhere near as good as, say, one of the girls on The Hills. Far from it. But for someone making a living as a lawyer or as a middle management drone in a good corporate job, her character is living a dream of sorts; making a living doing something fun and creative. It's a humble dream, to be sure, but a realistic dream, the kind that seems more fulfilling because it actually borders on the real and possible. As crazy as the plots are, in terms of the job and the characters' lots in life, 30 Rock offers the kind of life you could actually picture yourself getting, or at least someone you know getting.

Why Japan isn't as Computer-literate as the U.S

2008-05-06T14:16:00.003+09:00

Some time back I wrote this post about Japan getting left behind in the digital age, in response to an article in Newsweek Asia about Japan's slump in consumer electronics.

The other day on reddit I found an interesting follow-up article by on GT!Blog explaining how Japan's memory-intensive written form slowed its progress with micro-computers back in the early ages of PCs.

Today I noticed that another blog was referring traffic to my earlier post, so I thought I'd do an update with a link to the new article, to give those readers coming for that a little extra information about the subjects.

Turns out, those readers already know about that new article....because that's where the traffic was coming from in the first place. The hotlinked comment about interesting blog responses leads right back to me. It's a small internet world after all.

Sports, Games and Childhood

2008-05-06T12:06:00.004+09:00

I remember reading an article by a cognitive psychologist back when basketball superstar Micheal Jordan tried (and failed) to start a second career as a baseball player.

Baseball seems pretty easy compared to basketball. There's a reason companies start softball teams instead of basketball ones- because it requires less athleticism to master the basics. So how did Jordan screw it up so badly?

According to the cognitive psychologist, it was just too late for him. There are complex cognitive processes that go into gauging where a fast moving ball is relative to your swing. Anyone can learn it if they start early enough...but like a second language (which children pick up with ease), after the age of 21, it becomes difficult to truly master it. With enough hard work, an older person that never played it as a child can get pretty good, but they'll never truly be a natural at it.

This rings pretty true to me. The only competitive sport I really played as a kid was soccer, and that's the only one I have a real grasp of the basics with, even though these days I get a lot more opportunities to practice basketball. Counting by raw hours spent playing over the past few years, I should be better at basketball than I am at soccer at this point. But I'm not.

I bring it up because of the video game Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The Wii I bought in December never became the time eater I worried it might, but Smash Bros remains a really fun game that I find myself playing sometimes. Unlike most video games, that focus on mastering a narrow set of actions (shoot the target, steer the car, etc) and become tiring and repetitive after a few weeks of play, Smash Bros has hundreds of move combinations, and the controls are so easy to manipulate and flexible that in some respects it simulates a real sport. Most importantly, it involves playing against real people, which leads to endless variations in what you can encounter in a match.

As much as I enjoy it, I've come to a sad realization: I will likely never be very good at it. I can memorize all the little moves and techniques, but when it gets right down to it, I just can't move as skillfully as the serious players. It might seem like they're just tapping their fingers and thumbs on a controller rather than playing a real sport. In terms of physical condition they might be sorely lacking compared to an athlete, but in terms of coordination, skill, response speed and rapid decisions, they're already all the way over in the real sport category. And the average person just can't pick up what they do offhand. They move so fast you can't even see what they're doing to one another in a match unless you put the video in slow motion.

How do they do it? In the name of um, scientific inquiry I found an online forum where they gather and discuss moves and asked how long it took them to get good. Most of them are between 14-18 years old, and have been playing various versions of the 12-year-old game for about ten years, since they were 5 or 6 years old in most cases.

Which means I'm probably getting beaten by kids in most cases aren't old enough to drive yet. The only thing more embarrassing than being an adult that blows off steam playing a Nintendo game...is being an adult that plays that game, and often gets his ass kicked by kids that in many cases aren't even out junior high yet.

Presentations

2008-05-06T11:16:00.004+09:00

There's a constant push at my university for lecturers to conduct research, publish and present. Most of my time not teaching is spent throwing ideas back and forth about experimental designs, and finding journals to submit papers to and conferences to present at. Another teacher set up a white board with every ESL Conference going on in the world this year. The university pays our expenses if we go to any of them.

When we first got this job, me and Nick (formerly of Brighten College, now working at the same place) joked about finding conferences in Hawaii to present at. Actually, looking at the options available that isn't as far-fetched as it sounded at first. A big conference is in Bali this year, and the University of Hawaii in Manoa has a first rate Applied Linguistics program and likely hosts some stuff from time to time.

One conference that has caught everyone's attention is going on in Cambodia. Not exactly a tranquil vacation spot, but everyone is curious to see it. I've been there a couple times already, but wouldn't mind going back. Its during the long spring break, so I could hop over to Thailand afterward. And then I got to thinking...maybe we can all gang-submit proposals, get accepted simultaneously, and all descend on Cambodia as a big group, and once its over, just stay in Southeast Asia (off the university tab, of course).

In Japan a lot of conferences go on during long weekends, but if I plan trips over summer and spring breaks my work related travel and vacations could wind up blending together and becoming one of the same.

Rap is Dying

2008-04-25T21:43:00.005+09:00

Just a few years ago names like 50 Cent and Eminem ruled the charts, but sales of hard rap have plummeted to pathetic new lows. Look at what rap has to show for itself on the charts this week-

Top 30 Album Sales - Hip Hop

Rank	Artist	Album	This Week	Total

11	Rick Ross	Trilla	26,735	443,114

That's about it for the top 30. Hip Hop DX tries to fluff up the numbers by including "R&B" such as Mariah Carey's new album, the manufactured pop groups Dannity Kane and Day 26 and the new Gnarles Barkley, which doesn't have a single rap on it anywhere (Gnarles Barkley's vocalist is a successful rapper-turned-singer).

Even the Top 30's sole entry Rick Ross isn't doing so well. His album has apparently peaked out, leaving the top 10 without even reaching Gold status, let alone platinum.

Rap did change pop music, and it's true that it has an influence on many other acts. For example, the new Madonna album is produced by Timbaland and the Neptunes, who flavor her usual pop with some new sounds (These producers seem to see the writing on the wall- all their latest high-profile clients have been singers). And rappers-turned-singers such as Cee-lo of Gnarles Barkley that have broken out of the standard mold and brought new sounds into their music have continued to see success. But the prototypical rapper going on about guns and selling crack seems to finally be going out of style.

Japan is running out of Food

2008-04-25T19:10:00.004+09:00

Even "first world" nations are beginning to feel the global food shortage. I remember coming here and being surprised by the statistic that Japan imports 50% of its food. Apparently that statistic is dated; as Japanese turn to western food such as beef and bread, that figure has risen to 60-70%.

Apparently, Japan is now facing a major food shortage, and has completely run out of butter. I thought that this was an exaggeration, but looking at the supermarket today....sure enough, all gone.

The Kagoshima Shinkansen

2008-04-21T19:24:00.002+09:00

So Japan Rail is building a high-speed bullet train from Fukuoka, which used to be the end of the line for the fast trains, down to Kagoshima, at the southernmost tip of Japan's main islands, deep into some of the country's most remote depths. Not a lot of people head down there on business, so all the advertising is based on the idea of escaping the city and exploring a quieter, purer stretch of the nation. All the ads feature the model above, enjoying the countryside and getting away from it all. One ad even had her having to stop for a crossing of baby ducks. She looked delighted.

Everytime I rush through Hakata station in Fukuoka city, weaving through the endless crowds and spinning my hamster wheel in the great rat-race, I see posters like the one above, with that model beckoning me to just leave the city and get away from it all by going to Kagoshima, where life is pure...good...the way it should be.

Finally, I actually did take the shinkansen down to Kagoshima, on the way to Yakushima with my dad. And on the way back, look who I saw in the train station.

Its the same model, only now she's standing in front of Fukuoka. Her hair is swept to one side, and she's wearing chic city clothes and cocking her head to one side defiantly. She is everything urban and cosmopolitan. The caption reads "meet the new me in Fukuoka, in just 2 hours and 17 minutes."

Actually, you know what? Fuck this one-horse town, come up to Fukuoka, you hick!

Make your Macbook a desktop, for still less than the cost of a Macbook Pro

2008-04-20T09:01:00.008+09:00

What have I been up to? I'm just busy all the time. The new jobs are great, but its the beginning of the semester and there's a ton of planning to do. I go in to work 6 or 7 days a week. Even at home I'm on the job. Today is the only day of the week I won't go into the office, and I've got to submit a proposal for a conference presentation and plan tomorrows classes. I have to hurry up and get it all done to go out with my girlfriend for her birthday dinner.

Anyway, just a few quick words on the shiniest toy and single most interesting distraction in my new work life- My new Macbook.

Just one tip for people trying to decide between this or the considerably more expensive Macbook Pro- aside from the video card, the main difference is the screen size and the speakers. For this upgrade, you pay close to double the price. I suspect they deliberately kept the Macbook screens stuck at 13" to push people to go up a tier. Aside from that, there wasn't much difference as of when I bought it. Both had around 2.4 ghz dual core processor, give or take 0.2 Ghz.

My computer budget was about $2500, which was juuust under the cost of a low-end Macbook Pro (I know how expensive that is for the US...Apple gouges people with prices here). So instead, we bought Macbooks, and used the extra money for peripherals. Doing that, I think I found a combination I'm happier with anyway, for cheaper.

By buying the Macbook, you can afford to get 2 extra gigabytes of ram to compensate for the videocard, a full-size, 22" monitor (as low as $300 if you look around), a decent 2-button buffalo mouse for about $12, a decent pair of $30 computer speakers with a subwoofer, and a mac external keyboard for maybe $50. For an extra 70 you can even throw in an external hard drive to make up for the difference there.

At your desktop, hook up the mouse and the keyboard to the macbook and make the larger monitor your primary one, and you have an excellent desktop computer. If you have parallels, you can run windows on the macbook monitor, and OSX on the larger monitor, and switch between then effortlessly (Don't worry about a tax on performance, either...with 2.4 Ghz dual core and 4GB of Ram, the Macbook has power to spare for all of this). When you leave work, just unplug the macbook from the keyboard and monitor, and boom, your powerful desktop just turned into a laptop, which unlike the some of the larger pros, is small enough to fit in your briefcase. It's the best of both worlds.

Vending Machine Stuff in Japan

2008-04-13T10:21:00.004+09:00

Hot read bean paste soup and corn soup, in heated cans.

Coffee in a can, very sweetened, very "whitened", and cold. Soft, watery fruit jelly. A custard drink. Vegetable juice.

Chips, in a can. The same custard drink as above, but this time in a bag that you suck on from a spout on the top. A big bottle of cold green tea.