himazu on Japan, Tech, and Social Issues

U.S. election officials, how about OCRing paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines?

2009-08-23T11:33:00.008+09:00

This Science Friday Story on a voting machine hacking reminds me of my long standing question. Why does U.S. seemingly insist on electronic voting machines? How about collecting paper ballots at voting stations in the very old fashioned way and counting them using optical character recognition (OCR) machines? U.S. Postal Service should be using OCR to sort letters. So I infer that recognizing people's hand writing at decent accuracy should be well established.

More specifically, a voting station would have physical ballot boxes. No electronic equipment is needed. For voter registration checking, computers may be used, but voter lists printed on paper can do the job.

After a voting period ends, the ballot boxes from voting stations would be collected to a counting place where OCR machines count votes. One desktop size OCR machine should be able to count hundreds of votes per minutes if not thousands. (I saw a demo of such a machine on TV.) Not only votes on the voting day but also absentee votes can be counted in the same manner as long as the same paper ballots are used.

In all cases where I hear/see/read on voting machine security as in the Science Friday story, experts tell to have paper ballots for auditing. But I've never heard they propose not to use electronic voting machines. It might be just my ignorance. If so, that's fine and I'd appreciate if somebody enlightens me.

Shift Happens - We are living exponential times

2008-05-25T09:36:00.003+09:00

I stumbled upon an educator's (seemingly) point of view on how we should think about now and near future in the midst of exponential changes in technologies and societies.

Mathemagical Entertainment

2008-05-25T01:06:00.004+09:00

The presentation titled "Secrets of Mental Math" held at ETech 2007 is now available on IT Conversations here. Very entertaining. It's not only for technically/scientifically minded but also for others.

System administration in the cloud computing era

2008-05-16T07:27:00.005+09:00

An long interview to Adam Jacob and Jesse Robbins on the Technometria podcast is quite interesting for me as an ex-infrastructure builder/administrator turned into web application developer/architect.

They are using the following tools to manage applications running on Amazon SC2 and other cloud computing environments.

13 year old singer

2008-04-19T20:34:00.002+09:00

I came across this video and was impressed.
Can somebody tell me what this British TV show is?

Even a talented person takes years, even a decade

2008-04-18T06:03:00.002+09:00

I'm a big fan of the radio program “This American Life”. The main personality of the program, Ira Glass seems to be a die-hard public radio guy and very talented. If you hear a couple of episodes of the program (all past episodes are available online), you know what I'm talking about.

And I got to know an interview with him is available on YouTube.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

A “O'Reilly Radar” posting and a “Signal vs. Noise” posting mention the part 2 of the interview regarding the importance of discarding not so great things to make a superb thing.

But to me, equally eye-opening was he took a decade or so to get to the level of a good radio reporter/producer. He played his radio reporting at his 8th year as an example of crappy one. He also said that many people cannot bear the gap between their superb taste and their not-up-to-snuff outcome and quit a career. He emphasizes that it's inevitable at the early stage of a career and the only way to overcome that is keep working.

Question your work

2008-04-16T06:37:00.002+09:00

I came across a blog posting titled “Question your work” on “Signal vs. Noise”. It tells you to ask the following questions in your work regardless the size of a task/project you are working on:

Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Will this change (user) behavior? [(user) is added by me]
Is there an easier way?
Waht's theopportunity cost?
Is it really worth it?

I posted it on my PC display at work.

This is along the line with what Tim Ferris said in the presentation titled “The 4-Hour Workweek” on last year's SXSW conference:

Ask your self periodically: Am I productive or just busy? Am I producing something or doing a crutch activity?

The list above is much more concrete and useful to me.

If you are still early in your career, you may not need to worry about what to do and what not to do. But as you grow matured at work, you will need to.

The Myth of the Rational Voter

2008-04-15T06:18:00.003+09:00

I listened to a presentation at South by Southwest 2008 titled “The Myth of the Rational Voter”. The presenter was Bryan Caplan, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. It was a counter-argument to The Wisdom of Crowd. He pointed out several examples of The Wisdom of Crowd not holding true. He proceed to ask for re-thinking democracy.

Awesome future of biology

2008-04-09T07:01:00.002+09:00

I came across impressive presentations and interviews on biology.

“Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention” by Craig Venter
MP3 file is here.
“On the verge of creating synthetic life” by Craig Venter
You can download the video to iTunes and the MPEG 4 file on the page.
“Fighting Virulent Bacteria” on Bio Tech Nation
MP3 file is here.

Presentation one and two above are similar, but one is more comprehensive while with two you can see slides which help understand the content. So I'd recommend to listen/watch in that order. Both tell that genetic information from newly found micro organisms is mounting at a very rapid pace and no no sign of slowing down. And designing and synthesizing life is becoming reality.

There is a bacteria which makes octane (an ingredient of gasoline) from carbon dioxide and sunlight -- photosynthesis is not the only way for life to materialize sunlight energy. Vender's research team is working on engineering such bacteria so that it does that efficiently.

Interview three above says that a person has 10 times more non human cells than human cells -- we have a huge number of bacteria mainly in gastrointestinal tract. Bioscience now understands the importance of those bacterias. Human being depends on them while they don't.

Japanese ISPs To Ban File Sharers. NOT!

2008-03-20T19:29:00.004+09:00

The article titled "Japanese ISPs To Ban File Sharers" drew a lot of attention on TechCrunch recently. The article is rootless. Japanese ISPs observe net neutrality reasonably well and there is no sign of weakening of the attitude.

The origin and the chain of misreporting
The misreporting is originated from a Japanese article on Yomiuri Online, which is run by a Japanese newspaper having the biggest circulation in Japan. The article misreports the Japanese ISPs effort to reasonably restrict residential users' net traffic.

After it's posted, the following events happened.

The Yomiuri's Japanese article was translated into English and posted as "Winny copiers to be cut off from Internet".
The above article caught attention of TrentFreak and the article "Japanese ISPs Agree to Ban Pirates from the Internet" was posted.
The above article caught attention of TechCrunch and was led to the article mentioned at the beginning of this posting.

The nature of the original Japanese article
The crux of the original article is as follows.

The nation's four Internet provider organizations have agreed to forcibly cut the Internet connection of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music, it was learned Friday.
...
According to the new agreement, copyright organizations would notify providers of Internet protocol addresses used by those who repeatedly make copies illegally, using special detection software. The providers would then send warning e-mails to the users based on the IP addresses of the computers used to connect to the Internet. If contacted users did not then stop their illegal copying, the providers would temporarily disconnect them from the Internet for a specified period of time or cancel their service-provision contracts.

Two days later on Mar 17, Japan Internet Providers Association (JAIPA) published the draft of "The Guideline on Traffic Control Policy"(in Japanese only) and started gathering public comments. The draft is endorsed by three other ISP associations in Japan. It's a guideline on which individual ISPs would set their traffic control policy.

Most likely, the four ISP agreement mentioned in the Yomiuri's article is about the guideline draft. But the draft doesn't mention measures against repeated Winny uses and the scheme for copyright holders.

There are two possibilities here:

The Yomiuri article has some truth in it when written. But the guideline draft was changed after the article was posted.
The Yomiruri reporter learned about the guideline draft from unreliable sources and/or lacked necessary domain knowledge hence forged the article.

To me, 2 is more likely. I guess the draft was published as scheduled on Monday. Then, it's difficult to make such a change in two days after the article was posted.

Legitimacy of the traffic control policy guideline
Please be noted that in Japan, 100Mbps Internet connection for home users via fiber optics is widely provided at 40 to 60 US$ a month. As of the end of 2007, there are 11 million fiber optics Internet subscribers in Japan. And there are 13 million DSL Internet subscribers, 4 million cable Internet subscribers.

As mentioned before, the guideline is about reasonably restricting residential net users' traffic.
Given the number of very high speed Internet users, Japanese ISPs have no option but restrict heavy users' traffic. The draft mentions that 1% of the users generate 50% of the net traffic.

The guideline draft observes net neutrality and communication privacy well.

Addendum on April 14, 2008
I had a chance to talk to a Japanese ISP executive and a central government bureaucrat dealing with the Internet. They said that the National Police Agency wanted to implement a rule along the line of the one reported in the Yomiuri article. But both ISPs and the ministry covering electronic communication have no intention to have such a rule. The Yomiuri reporter totally misunderstood the situation.

Miso Soup Is Not "Soup"

2008-03-19T07:20:00.003+09:00

Outside Japan, there are Japanese restaurants run by people not familiar with real Japanese food and way. What bugs me at those places is the way miso soup is served. Those restaurants serve miso soup as soup in a western style meal -- miso soup is served before the entré and the restaurant assume it to be finished before that. This doesn't happen at genuine Japanese restaurants.

Miso soup is not "soup". It's made to be eaten with steamed rice. If you feel miso soup is too salty when you eat it by itself, you are right. Otherwise, it doesn't taste good when it's eaten with rice.

I don't go such restaurants voluntarily. But sometimes those are my non Japanese friends' favorites and I sometimes accompany them. I leave miso soup uneaten until the entré is served. Sometime, a waiter tries to take away untouched miso soup assuming I don't have it, in which case I need to defend my miso soup.

The Nagoya Omiai Protocol

2006-09-29T23:58:00.002+09:00

There is the institution of "omiai" in Japan. It's a date arranged by a go-between, typically a middle aged woman. And it's a family matter. Not only a young man and a woman, but also their parents are involved.

An omiai date itself is not so unusual. Except the go-between attends to introduce the man to the woman and vice versa. The go-between leaves after the introduction. Then starts a date of a man and a woman who don't know well each other.

After the date, the man is supposed to see the woman home. Here a social protocol kicks in. In one protocol, the woman's parents are supposed to bring him in and give him tea and cake. If he likes the woman and wants to go forward, he drinks the tea. If he really likes her, he has the cake in addition. If he doesn't like her, he declines the tea, let along the cake. This way of showing the man's willingness is not official. Official communication takes place through the go-between the following day or so.

A friend of mine born and raised and living in Nagoya city for his entire life told me this protocol. Let's call it the Nagoya omiai protocol. Nagoya is a big city having Toyota as its economic backbone and known by its peculiar culture in Japan. I don't know other omiai protocols. But most likely, this is not widely observed in Japan.

When he explained the protocol, he confessed that he came to know the protocol after getting married. He went through several omiai's. He's a kind of person very few women don't like. Especially with women searching for their partner through omiai. In all the cases but last, he declined women he met at omiai's.

Without knowing the local protocol, he always had the tea and the cake he was offered when he saw a woman home. He regretted deeply how insulting he had been to the women and their parents. After showing his fondness to a woman on the day of omiai by having the tea and the cake, he communicated turndown through the go-between.

How Indirect Kyoto People Are

2006-09-28T05:56:00.001+09:00

Kyoto people are known to be quite indirect among Japanese people. There is a story showing it.

Assume you are visiting a home in Kyoto personally around noon. The host would offer a light meal by saying "how about having bubuzuke?"

Bubuzuke is the Kyoto dialect of ochazuke. Ochazuke is steamed rice topped with something (e.g. grilled salmon flakes, salmon roe) and soaked in green tea. It's a light meal. It cannot be a real meal.

The rule is, you have to decline the offer at first. And then the host would offer it again. You have to decline again. Only after the host offers it three times, you can accept it. If the host actually wants the guest to leave, the host doesn't offer three times. But to be polite, the host offers at least once.

Accepting the offer at the first or second time is not expected -- not following the Kyoto home visit protocol.

This is known to many Japanese people if not majority. Shortly after I got married to a Kyoto woman, I asked my wife if it's true.

"Not quite," she said. According to her:

Offering bubuzuke around noon really means "please leave now". How many times the host offers is irrelevant.

If the host really intends to offer lunch, it's prepared by then and they say "please have lunch". The expectation is that at the moment the guest hears the word bubuzuke, they know the time to leave.

After explaining it, she asked "this is a well accepted protocol all over Japan, right?" Not! She was born and raised and living there until she was 30.

When you deal with katakana in your program

2006-03-31T08:41:00.000+09:00

Katakana is one of several sets of characters used to write Japanese . Katakana is a phonetic alphabet whereas kanji is an ideogram -- each kanji character has a meaning and a set of pronunciations whereas each katakana character has only a pronunciation.

It's good to know that there is another kind of phonetic alphabet in Japanese -- hiragana. Hiragana and katakana are like lower and upper cases. Each hiragana character has a corresponding katakana character. Hiragana being off-topic, I don't go farther with hiragana here.

You can see a table of katakana characters here. For historical reasons, there is another set of katakana characters called half width katakana. You can see a half width katakana table here.

When you talk about non half width katakana specifically, you should call it full width katakana. Half width and full width came from how those sets of characters are displayed and printed. Typically, half width katakana characters occupies half the width of kanji characters whereas full width katakana occupies the same width as kanji.

When computers were much less capable, half width katakana was the only way to represent Japanese on computers. Consisted of 63 characters and taking the same resolution to display and print, katakana was easy enough to handle even in old days. Handling thousands of kanji characters requiring much higher display and print resolution had not been practical until the mid 80's. Representing Japanese only with katakana is somewhat like representing English only with upper case letters, which was common at the dawn of computing.

There are two pronunciation modifier symbols used in katakana -- voice sound mark and half voiced sound mark. For example, using Unicode code points and character names, U+30AC (KATAKANA LETTER GA) is U+30AB (KATAKANA LETTER KA) with a voiced sound mark attached. When half width katakana was designed and implemented, they decided not to have precomposed character of a katakana character with a pronunciation modifier.

Rather, it's represented, displayed, and printed as two consecutive characters. This is because it takes more dots and/or screen resolution to represent a katakana character with a pronunciation modifier as a precomposed single character.

Time went by and computers had become powerful enough to represent around 6000 Japanese characters requiring higher display and print resolution than Latin letters. Full width katakana was introduced in addition to half width katakana so that katakana characters are displayed and printed more properly.

As you can imagine, there is no need to use half width katakana now. However, for backward compatibility, half width katakana is still available and many people end up using it simply because it's available. And unfortunately, a typical user doesn't care half with and full width. Here arises needs for conversion between half width and full width katakana -- you have to normalize Japanese input data to half width or full width. Otherwise, search won't yield expected results.

There is another occasion where half width to full width conversion is necessary -- for email. The vast majority of Japanese email is in ISO-2022-JP charset, which lack half width katakana. There are cases where half width katakana is contained in a ISO-2022-JP text data, but ISO-2022-JP defined by RFC 1468 doesn't have half width katakana.

As described so far, the basic difference between full width and half width katakana is that the former has precomposed character whereas the latter doesn't. When you convert a half width katakana string into full width, you have to recognize a sequence of a katakana character followed by a pronunciation modifier and convert them into a single precomposed character.

Japanese Spams Gmail Cannot Filter

2006-03-06T11:15:00.000+09:00

One month ago or so, I started seeing Japanese spams which Gmail fails to filter much more frequently than before. Until then, Gmail spam filter had been doing a decent job with Japanese spams, but that's not the case now. I'm receiving dozens of Japanese spams which Gmail fails to filter everyday now, which is quite annoying.

The distinguishing characteristics of those spams is that their subjects are claimed to be in the ISO-2022-JP charset but actually in the SHIFT_JIS charset. And they are encoded in base 64. e.g.

Subject: =?ISO-2022-JP?B?kWaQbJBsjciSsouzk6+NRInvgqmC54LMgqiSbYLngrmBQg==?=

The problem is that, according to my observation, because of the false claim, Gmail understands the subject as a random string hence its spam filter doesn't work as it should. Here's how Gmail looks to understand the subject:

The false claim is a result of sloppy understanding of how to compose a Japanese email. It's ironic that the sloppiness works in favor of the spammers against Gmail's spam filter.

I'd really like Gmail to cope with it soon. Let me point out that this spamming technique is not Japanese specific; it can be employed for other languages as well.

Added on 2006-03-20:
At the time I published this posting, I notified Google about it. I don't know how it contributed, but now, Gmail's SPAM filter seems to be able to cope with SPAMs of this kind to some extent.

Why Firefox's Share Is Small in Japan

2006-03-03T22:14:00.000+09:00

This posting is inspired by a Slashdot Japan story of the same title. Some of the points made in the story are elaborated here.

According to a presentation in Mozilla Japan Seminar, Firefox's share is substantially smaller in Japan than in other regions. At this point, Firefox has 12% share world-wide, 20% in Europe, 15% in North America, 10% across Asia, and as small as 4% in Japan. Let me think why.

Japanese-Unfriedly
I think the prime reason is that Firefox is so Japanese-unfriendly. Firefox's web site design, download instruction, documentation, default font and character parameters have or used to have rooms for improvement for Japanese speakers. Average computer users in Japan are not comfortable with them. Even though there are a fair number of Japanese speakers involved with Firefox, Japanese localization is not enough.

For example, Japanese characters having many strokes on average, readability of serif fonts is noticeably less than san serif on computer screens. Screen resolution is still not enough to display serifs of a complex character at 10 point or so. Think about the dawn of personal computer around 1980. Characters being displayed at 5 dot by 7 dot, serif font design was impractical.

Firefox had long been employing a serif font (Mincho) as the default Japanese font. Whereas Internet Explorer's default Japanese font is a san serif font (Gothic). From version 1.5, Firefox's default Japanese font is san serif though.

I suspect that in Japan, English proficiency rate among computer users is quite low -- probably the world lowest. There are regions where general English proficiency rate is lower than Japan. But in those regions, computer users are in the privileged class and they tend to speak English.

Japanese Friendly Alternatives
There is another noteworthy factor. Before Firefox became popular, several free tab browsers using IE component emerged in Japan. Firefox's biggest appeal (arguably) being the tab feature, computer users in Japan got good IE based alternatives before Firefox. Those free tab browsers are written by Japanese programmer, those browsers are comfortable for Japanese users in terms of documentation, default parameters, and the feature set.

Postscript on 2006-09-28
Originally, I mentioned that one reason of low English proficiency in Japan was education. Not the quality of English education, but the fact that education is done in Japanese all the way. Whereas many non English speaking countries, college education is done in English.

A reader pointed out that in most countries, education is done in local language up to graduate school. I asked a Peruvian and an Italian friends about it. The reader is proved to be right.

Greetings in Japanese in the office

2005-12-11T15:31:00.000+09:00

There are a sizable number of non native Japanese speakers working in Japan. When it comes to greetings in Japanese in the office, they rarely do it right. Very few native Japanese speakers correct them because that's considered impolite and non native Japanese speakers making mistakes in Japanese is acceptable.

Never the less, it's better to do it right. And for native Japanese speakers, hearing incorrect greetings everyday is a bit annoying. So I'd give you some advices.

1. There is no Japanese equivallent of "How are you?"
Native English speakers tend to simply assume there is a Japanese equivalent of "How are you?". So they tend to say "どうですか(Dou desuka)" or "お元気ですか(Ogenki desuka)", etc. after saying Japanese equivalent of "Good morning", "Good afternoon", etc. But that's not a right assumption. There is NO Japanese equivalent. The proper morning greeting in Japanese in the office is "おはようございます(Ohayou gozaimasu)". That's it!

If a person shows up after a sick leave, it's natural to ask the person's condition by saying e.g. "もうすっかりいいのですか(Mou sukkari ii no desuka)" (Are you all right now?). But that's not a greeting but a real question.

2. Saying "see you tomorrow" in Japanese is not simple
Native English speakers tend to memorize one phrase as THE equivalent of "see you tomorrow/next week". But there are several in Japanese depending on the situation.

When you leave office before others do or somebody else leaves office before you do, the standard way is:

Leaving worker A: おさきに失礼します(Osakini shitsurei shimasu)
Staying worker B: おつかれさま(Otsukaresama)

There are colloquial ways used commonly between colleagues. But I'd recommend to stick to the above until you are really sure it's right to be colloquial. For example, you are supposed to be formal and polite to an elder or longer serving person even if that person is at the same or lower rank as you.

A staying worker can always say "おつかれさま". A CEO may say so to a lowest ranked worker and there is nothing wrong with that. And a lowest ranked worker may say so to a CEO. But if a leaving worker is a lot higher ranked as a staying worker, the leaving worker saying "おさきに失礼します" sounds odd. It sounds lacking self-esteem. So in that case, "おさきに(Osakini)" is the right form.

You may leave office together with somebody else. When you part from the person down the road, there are two ways to greet depending on the situation. If the person is senior to you, you are supposed to say "失礼します"(Shitsurei shimazu)". Here, "senior" means that the person is at a higher rank in the office OR elder than you. If the person is equal or junior to you, you are supposed to say "おつかれさま(Otsukaresama)".

In all of these cases, in English, you can say "see you tomorrow". But in Japanese, there are four ways (at least):
"おさきに失礼します"
"おさきに"
"おつかれさま"
"失礼します"
Using a wrong one sounds impolite and/or odd.