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5月5日 Summary of 2007 Golden WeekFriday ( 4/27 )
- Apparently, everyone was smiling, heading for his lovely home. Not exceptional for me. Did a bit of cleanup, rearranging and transferring of Emule files. Add some Yoga, WestWing files. Saturday The first special day of the first public holiday was adorned by my sleepy little eye. It was due to spending extra 2-3 hours on watching fancy drame, Sex and the City the night before. I did a little study before set off for shinjuku. Instead of taking train from takadanobaba, i took a walk. To my surprise, it is much nearer compared to the last time. Well, actually i sprinted a bit from time to time. Sweating all in the back of my shirts, i was totally obsessed with digging out the best frame i could, in a korean shop in shinokubo. While waiting for the glasses to be ready, as planned before last night, i headed towards the nearest "Bookoff", a local book recycle shop. Fortuitously, i managed to grab a good one. The first shopping in 2 months! Tokyo weather is not unpredictable as the notorious London ones. The weather forecast was totally out of shot. The rain came down in buckets out of sudden. Everyone was so totally caught inside the subway station. It was a bit cold and some could not stop shivering. My shabby room finally shows its true colour. Dashing at full throttle took me about 30 seconds this time. A brand new record! Hooray ! Sunday One of my colleague, hirose told me he used to play table-tennis during campus life. That was a half-year-old "old" story. Finally, it was my chance to mark my words. We spent 3 hours in a sport center nearby. 2oo yen for 5 hours play. Pretty good deal! Although i'm not more crazed for table-tennis as what i did in primary school( 4 hours of training after school) and haven't played it since the stone age, thanks to my primary school table-tennis coach, my basic is still there. As a way of showing my gratitude, could i spill the beans? My coach used to be a national champions and national representative. A real reputable figure! After the play, we had a lundin(lunch-dinner coined phrase?) in MOSBurger. We spent hours and hours bad-mouthing other colleagues.( kidding ! ^.^) Monday My host father was partially paralyzed. It was a real shocked one when host mom told me bout that. I could never imagine that mountain-climbing enthusiast would end up as a hemiplegic patient. One year later, determination and patience finally paid. Now he can walk with the help of a crutch. We had a lunch in Yokohama Ukaitei as a celebration of my new life(Student Association's "secession") and his progress in rehabilitation. Sitting in front of wide hot plate, we were totally enthralled by the topnotch performance of the chef. Needless to say, the taste is undoubtedly the top-flight one. Tuesday --Drama day-- I finished some episodes of WestWing1. Wednesday --Music day-- Recategorizing my music collection. --WinningElevenDay--
I had a good fight with ShyoShyo. The result was 3-2. I m leading.
Thursday --Nabe day-- I did a bit of searching and was totally bombarded by the types of nabe. Friday --Quoted-- Kasai Rinkai Koen in Edogawa-ku is one of Tokyo's largest park, sprawling over 795,000 m2. Bordering the Tokyo Bay and separated from Tokyo Disneyland in Chiba prefecture by just the broad Edo River, it is an ideal place for a refreshing stroll, picnic or have fun with one's dogs. The park can be seen from afar thanks to its huge 117m high Ferris wheel, the tallest in Japan. The Flowers and Diamonds (admission 700yen, open from 10am to 8pm) as it is called carries 68 cars and the full rotation takes 17 minutes. The wheel offers great views on Disneyland, Tokyo Bay, Tokyo and even Mount Fuji on clear days (November to March being the clearest). The other main attraction is the Kasai Rinkai Aquarium (admission 700yen, open from 9:30am to 4pm), one of Kanto's finest. The aquarium is famous for its gigantic tunas an bonitos swimming like silvery robots around a 360 degree room. Apart from them, there are hammerhead sharks, angelfishes, surgeonfishes, anemones, morays, giant crabs, deep sea fishes, and fishes from all seven oceans. The other stars of the place are the many penguins and other sea birds. --end-- 4月28日 First day of 2007 Golden weekThe first special day of the first public holiday was adorned by my sleepy little eye. It was due to spending extra 2-3 hours on watching fancy drame, Sex and the City the night before. I did a little study before set off for shinjuku. Instead of taking train from takadanobaba, i took a walk. To my surprise, it is much nearer compared to the last time. Well, actually i sprinted a bit from time to time. Sweating all in the back of my shirts, i was totally obsessed with digging out the best frame i could, in a korean shop in shinokubo. While waiting for the glasses to be ready, as planned before last night, i headed towards the nearest "Bookoff", a local book recycle shop. Fortuitously, i managed to grab a good one. The first shopping in 2 months! Tokyo weather is not unpredictable as the notorious London ones. The weather forecast was totally out of shot. The rain came down in buckets out of sudden. Everyone was so totally caught inside the subway station. It was a bit cold and some could not stop shivering. My shabby room finally shows its true colour. Dashing at full throttle took me about 30 seconds this time. A brand new record! Hooray ! There is not much plan for the next few days. Am i going to hatch eggs at home ? No way, i swear to myself that i should hang on something. Bear in mind that this will be the longest holiday for me this year. Where should i go then? No place in Japan actually attracts me anymore. Sad ....... 8月31日 Revolutionizing FootballA startup venture, EndGame Technologies, has designed novel computer modeling software to assist National Football League coaches with critical play-calling decisions--the kind that often determine the outcome of the game. Should a team punt on fourth down--or go for it? Or attempt a two-point conversion after a touchdown? The software, called ZEUS, is designed to answer such questions by calculating the consequences of each decision in a matter of seconds. Head ZEUS researchers Chuck Bower and Frank Frigo want to revolutionize football by changing the way plays are called. Already, their statistics on past NFL games have revealed that teams consistently lose approximately one game per season by making the wrong play calls in critical situations. And with only 16 games in an NFL season, each win or loss is of paramount importance. Football is a game of strategy and risk management. Each coach goes into a game with a plan, explains Dwight Smith, head football coach at MIT. Although every variable is considered beforehand, adjustments have to be made as the game progresses. ZEUS is meant to help coaches make those on-the-fly decisions. The software was created by mining historical NFL data and developing distribution curves of success rates for individual actions, such as how far a running back carries the ball. Coaches could use ZEUS at any point in the game, by entering a set of variables, such as the score, field position, possession, down, and time remaining on the clock. Then the user enters two play-call options and the software analyzes each one separately, playing the game to its conclusion 100,000 times. During each iteration, ZEUS considers a different scenario. All the decisions about play calls that occur after the initial play are based on historical NFL data. This data isn't specific to a particular coach, though; it's based on records from a wide variety of coaches. (The researchers call this algorithm the "generic" NFL coach.) In a matter of seconds, ZEUS displays the Game Winning Chance--the play that gives the team the highest probability of winning. Unlike interactive football simulations, which require about the same amount of time to play out as a real game, ZEUS performs its calculations and recommendations in real time, displaying the computer's results before the next snap. According to Bower, the challenge for them now lies not in the technology, but in getting NFL teams to adopt it. "We have shown it to 10 NFL teams, [everyone] from managers to head coaches," he says. "But at this point no one has stepped forward and said we are ready to pay for the product." The problem: ZEUS is still illegal under NFL guidelines. The league doesn't permit computers on the sidelines or in the coach's booth on game day. Although there are no restrictions on using high-tech analytical tools off the field, the traditional elements of strategy continue to be preserved on game day. "We are very resistant to changing for the sake of changing," says Brain McCarthy, NFL spokesperson. "Part of the appeal of the NFL is that it is man against man against elements and unscripted drama. When you add technology that could directly influence play on the field it has the potential of detracting from the overall product and enjoyability of the game." Bower and Frigo aren't the only ones pushing for a technological revolution in the NFL. KC Joyner, called "The Football Scientist," and a regular contributor to ESPN Insider, uses game film to track, tabulate, and analyze nearly every measurable statistic in an NFL game. These statistics, complied and explained in Scientific Football 2006 (pdf), use a performance-based metric system with the goal of "quantifying everything and putting it into perspective." Joyner believes that if an NFL team doesn't take advantage of the latest technology, it will be hurt in the long term. "Nontechnological teams can still get good players, and some things will work, but as they get further behind the curve, it is going to catch up to them at some point," he says. Whether or not the league accepts ZEUS and teams decide to use it remains to be seen. For now, it can be implemented only in practice situations. Bower and Frigo recently added customization--the ability to enter the characteristics of specific teams--and also developed a second application, ZEUS PPV ("Player Position Value"), which determines the value in incremental wins/losses per season of individual position players. "Once [NFL] teams begin to embrace technology, the entire league will advance and be more successful," says Joyner, "It is going to take one successful coach looking for an edge, willing to take a chance." 8月18日 The alliance against GooglePRINCE KLEMENS VON METTERNICH, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, would have no trouble recognising Google. To him, the world's most popular web-search engine would closely resemble the Napoleonic France that in his youth humiliated Austria and Europe's other powers. Its rivals—Yahoo!, the largest of the traditional web gateways, eBay, the biggest online auction and trading site, and Microsoft, a software empire that owns MSN, a struggling web portal—would look a lot like Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Metternich responded by forging an alliance among those three monarchies to create a “balance of power” against France. Google's enemies, he might say, ought now to do the same thing. Google announced two new conquests on August 7th. It struck a deal with Viacom, an “old” media firm, under which it will syndicate video clips from Viacom brands such as MTV and Nickelodeon to other websites, and integrate advertisements into them. This makes Google the clear leader in the fledgling but promising market for web-video advertising. It also announced a deal with News Corporation, another media giant, under which it will provide all the search and text-advertising technology on News Corporation's websites, including MySpace, an enormously popular social-networking site. These are hard blows for Yahoo! and MSN, which had also been negotiating with News Corporation. Both firms have been losing market share in web search to Google over the past year—Google now has half the market. They have also fallen further behind in their advertising technologies and networks, so that both make less money than Google does from the same number of searches. Safa Rashtchy, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, a securities firm, estimates that for every advertising dollar that Google makes on a search query, Yahoo! makes only 60-70 cents. Last month Yahoo! said that a new advertising algorithm that it had designed to close the gap in profitability will be delayed, and its share price fell by 22%, its biggest-ever one-day drop. MSN is further behind Google than Yahoo! in search, and its parent, Microsoft, faces an even more fundamental threat from the expansionist new power. Many of Google's new ventures beyond web search enable users to do things free of charge through their web browsers that they now do using Microsoft software on their personal computers. Google offers a rudimentary but free online word processor and spreadsheet, for instance. The smaller eBay, on the other hand, might in one sense claim Google as an ally. Google's search results send a lot of traffic to eBay's auction site, and eBay is one of the biggest advertisers on Google's network. But the relationship is imbalanced. An influential recent study from Berkeley's Haas School of Business estimated that about 12% of eBay's revenues come indirectly from Google, whereas Google gets only 3% of its revenues from eBay. Worst of all for eBay, Google is starting to undercut its core business. Sellers are setting up their own websites and buying text advertisements from Google, and buyers are using its search rather than eBay to connect with sellers directly. As a result, “eBay would be wise to strike a deep partnership with Yahoo! or Microsoft in order to regain a balance of power in the industry,” said the study's authors, Julien Decot and Steve Lee, sounding like diplomats at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. The alliances are already being struck. Last year Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that they would connect their instant-messaging systems—both of which are much more popular than Google's alternative—and in July they said that they would extend this co-operation to “voice chat” (formerly known as “calling”). In May, Yahoo! and eBay struck an alliance in which eBay will use technology from Yahoo! to place advertisements on its auction site. On the other side of the bargain, Yahoo! will use PayPal, eBay's online payment mechanism, for transactions from Yahoo!'s pages. (Google recently launched a rival payment system of its own.) The strongest alliance, of course, would be a merger or takeover. MSN and Yahoo! both wanted to buy some or all of AOL, a big, troubled internet-access company owned by Time Warner, a media conglomerate. But Google pre-empted its rivals last winter and bought a defensive stake in AOL. It still has its search and advertising technology stationed on AOL's site. Google may also make its instant-messaging service interoperable with AOL's, the most popular in the world. Ally or annex?With AOL lost to the enemy, what of a deal between Microsoft and either Yahoo! or eBay? Justin Post, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, said recently that Microsoft's “acquisition probability” is now so high that it may soon start pushing up the share prices of eBay and Yahoo! Mr Post thinks that Microsoft is most likely to bid for Yahoo! This would help Microsoft strategically, he says. Others are not sure. “I don't see it as a terribly good merger,” says Mr Rashtchy. There would be big cultural differences between a media company and a software firm. He thinks that a merger of Yahoo! and eBay, on the other hand, might make sense because both live mainly from serving online communities. Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley analyst and a fellow of the Institute for the Future, a research group, thinks that any merger between the three middle powers would be a “grand dramatic gesture” that would only hasten their decline. AOL's merger with Time Warner in 2000 is the relevant warning from recent history. Big mergers also run counter to a number of other trends on the internet today, which are collectively known as “Web 2.0”. “This is the age of mash-ups not mergers, open over closed,” says Mr Saffo, referring to the open internet standards that allow users to combine, or “mash” services. Another argument against full-blown mergers is that the bigger and more self-absorbed the established powers become, the less likely they are to spot new insurgencies—start-ups such as YouTube, an online video site, for instance, or MySpace. Their equivalents in Prince Metternich's day were the nationalist and liberal movements that troubled the continental monarchies, and erupted in the revolutions of 1848—forcing Metternich to resign and flee into exile in Britain. Affiliate marketing now coming of ageHalf my advertising budget is wasted, but I don't know which half," goes the old retailer's quip, but this dilemma may someday be a thing of the past. If so, affiliate marketing, a type of pay-for-performance advertising, will get some of the credit. It is an approach to marketing that is rapidly catching on with companies looking for a new, cost-effective way to reach customers. Leading the charge are companies like Tokyo-based ValueCommerce Co., whose president, Brian Nelson, explains the idea behind affiliate marketing: "(Clients) don't have to waste money on advertising. You're only paying for the benefit." Nelson was confident enough in his business model to list ValueCommerce shares on the Mothers market for startups on July 31. In affiliate marketing, someone might write about a new product on a blog. If someone reads the blog and purchases the product, the blogger, or affiliate, gets a commission on the sale. ValueCommerce, a pioneer in affiliate marketing in Japan with a 25 percent market share, makes money from commissions it receives by linking affiliates with online shopping malls and other e-commerce firms. Nelson became the chief operating officer in 2001, two years after the company was founded. Business has been good. The company posted a net profit of 173 million yen on sales of 4.0 billion yen in the business year through December. This year, ValueCommerce expects to make 497 million yen on sales of 5.4 billion yen. Unlike traditional advertising, where sellers pay a fixed price for space in a newspaper, magazine or Web site, in affiliate marketing the advertiser pays only when a sale is made, assuring the advertiser that its money is well spent. Nelson, a native of California, said the affiliate marketing industry is underdeveloped in Japan and has huge potential to grow. "People have only understood affiliate marketing over the last two years," Nelson said in a recent interview. "A lot of companies are starting to understand the benefit they get by using a pay-for-performance model." According to Nomura Securities Financial & Economic Research Center, the affiliate marketing industry in Japan has grown nearly eightfold in the last three years, from 5 billion yen in 2002 to 39 billion yen in 2005. It forecasts sales of 76 billion yen by 2007. Although affiliate marketing had already taken off in the United States and Europe when ValueCommerce was founded in 1999, it was slower to catch on in Japan. "The Japanese market was not using as many credit cards for online payments in 1999," Nelson said. "There were still many bank transfers and postal transfers, so we had to build a system that worked for the Japanese market." Seven years on, ValueCommerce has some 175,000 affiliates, of which 80 percent are individuals, and 1,650 e-commerce companies as clients. Last year, it entered into a tieup with Yahoo Japan Corp. Despite the growth, and perhaps because of it, the market has had teething problems. Some shady affiliates, for example, impersonate others to try to cash in on their hard-earned reputations. ValueCommerce and six other major affiliate marketing companies responded by setting up the Japan Affiliate Service Kyokai in May. The association will draw up guidelines for business practices by fall, monitor unethical behavior and educate the public about the industry. These challenges have not daunted Nelson, who remains optimistic about his company's future. His next target is to expand into other Asian markets, including South Korea and China. He noted that South Korea's high Internet penetration makes it easier for ValueCommerce to operate there. China, on the other hand, presents more of a challenge. Although there are about 40 million broadband users and 100 million Internet users in China overall -- mostly cell phone subscribers -- there are only 2 million credit card holders, he said. Coming up with a payment system for those cell phone buyers is the key. "There is a unique opportunity to think about how to make payments and different ways to advance pay-for-performance models in China," Nelson said. フレームワークの役割Zopeとは、ひとことで言うと Pythonで書かれたオープンソースのWebアプリケーションサーバです。主な特徴としては、
などがあります。
Cocoa
Mac OS Xに実装されている開発環境の一つ。Mac OS X開発の基盤となった旧NeXT社のOS「OPENSTEP」の流れを受け継ぐ環境で、Mac OS Xの機能をフルに引き出したソフトウェアをオブジェクト指向に基づいて開発することができる。 Mac OS Xには開発環境として、Mac OS 9互換モードの「Classic」、ClassicにMac OS Xの新機能を取り込んだ「Carbon」、Sun Microsystems社のJava環境が用意されているが、Mac OS Xネイティブの新しい環境としてCocoaが用意されている。Cocoaを使うことにより、Mac OS 9までにはなかった「Aqua」グラフィックインターフェースや、プリエンプティブなマルチタスク、保護されたメモリ空間などの新機能を、洗練されたオブジェクト指向APIを通じて容易に利用することができる。開発言語としてはOPENSTEP標準だった「Objective-C」やJavaが利用できる。Turbine Turbine is a servlet based framework that allows experienced Java developers to quickly build web applications. Turbine allows you to use personalize the web sites and to use user logins to restrict access to parts of your application. Turbine is a matured and well established framework that is used as the base of many other projects (like e.g. the excellent Jetspeed 1 Portals framework. Turbine is an excellent choice for developing applications that make use of a services-oriented architecture. Some of the functionality provided with Turbine includes a security management system, a scheduling service, XML-defined form validation server, and an XML-RPC service for web services. It is a simple task to create new services particular to your application. The Turbine core is free of any dependency on a presentation layer technology. Both JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Velocity are supported inside Turbine. For developers already familiar with JSP, or have existing JSP tag libraries, Turbine offers support for the Sun standard. Velocity is the favorite view technology of most users of the Turbine framework; try it out and see if Velocity can help you develop your web applications faster and work more easily with non-programming designers. Turbine is developed in an open, participatory environment and released under the Apache Software License. Turbine is intended to be a collaboration of the best-of-breed developers from around the world. We invite you to participate in this open development project.
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CakePHP Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility. RubyOnRails Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server. Everyone from startups to non-profits to enterprise organizations are using Rails. Rails is all about infrastructure so it's a great fit for practically any type of web application Be it software for collaboration, community, e-commerce, content management, statistics, management, you name it. Rails works with a wealth of web servers and databases. For web server, we recommend Apache or lighttpd, running either FastCGI or SCGI, or Mongrel. For database, you can use MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, or Firebird. Just about any operating system will do, but we recommend a 'nix-based one for deployment. Subliminal SearchThe number of images recorded by security cameras each day vastly exceeds human analysts' ability to examine them. "Computer vision" systems aren't much help: they're still far too primitive to tell a prowler from a postman. But researchers say the human brain can subconsciously register an anomaly in a scene -- say, a shadow where there shouldn't be one -- much faster than a person can visually and verbally identify it. If computers could somehow monitor the brain and flag these "aha" moments, surveillance analysts might be able to scan many times more images per hour. That's what Paul Sajda, a bioengineer at Columbia University's Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing, hopes to enable with his "cortically coupled computer vision" system, or "C3Vision." Sajda's prototype, built with a grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, includes a bonnet of electrodes that is placed on a subject's head, where it monitors changes in the brain's electrical activity. A computer scrutinizes those changes for the neural signatures of interesting events and images, as the subject watches a video running at 10 times its normal speed. The flagged images are picked out for a more intensive examination. "We are aiming to speed up [visual] search by 300 percent," says Sajda. "The system is designed not only for finding very specific targets but also things image analysts think are 'unusual,' which is very difficult to do with a computer vision system." Such devices could help law enforcement or counterterrorism officials spot signs of suspicious activity that would otherwise slip by as they scanned surveillance images. "Any system that can help process those images and prioritize them as to likelihood of containing important data is a vast improvement over the current situation," says Leif Finkel, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, who was Sajda's doctoral thesis advisor. Outside the security realm, radiologists hooked up to the C3Vision system could quickly screen hundreds of mammograms to identify those requiring a closer look, and photo researchers could use it to single out pictures of a particular person among the millions of photographs on the Web. "People are amazingly accurate at identifying whether a particular image -- say, of Marilyn Monroe, or the Washington Monument -- was presented as one photo" in a series of hundreds, even at a speed of 10 to 20 images per second, says Finkel. According to Sajda's recent tests, subjects spotted 90 percent of the "suspicious" images in a series running at 10 images per second. "I think that it is too early to tell whether this particular approach is going to work in real applications," says Misha Pavel, a professor of biomedical engineering at Oregon Health Sciences University. "But I have no doubt that we will learn from this approach, and the consequences may be entirely unexpected, novel applications." 7月31日 EU membership sharpens Central, East Europe's competitive edgeCentral and East European countries will continue to have a comparative advantage as destinations of foreign direct investment, although the changing environment will oblige them to diversify further into more service and knowledge-intensive sectors, said a researcher from the Japan External Trade Organization.
A recent JETRO survey shows that a majority of Japanese firms planning to build new manufacturing operations in Europe consider central and eastern parts of the region as candidate sites, Masakazu Tachikawa, director of the Europe Division of JETRO's Overseas Research Department, told the July 19 symposium. The accession of eight former Soviet bloc nations into the European Union in 2004 has contributed to improved business infrastructure in those countries, where low-cost and highly educated labor remains an advantage over the so-called old EU members, Tachikawa said. According to Tachikawa, the annual volume of foreign direct investment in Central and Eastern Europe, which stood at around 10 billion euros in the mid-1990s, began to pick up in 1997 as the process for the countries' entry into the EU accelerated, and topped 30 billion euros in 2004 and 2005. Investment by Japanese firms in the region has also increased since the late 1990s and, despite ups and downs over the years, topped 50 billion yen in 2003, he said. As of late 2005, the Czech Republic was the fourth-largest destination of Japanese manufacturing firms in Europe -- after Britain, Germany and France -- and two other Central and East European nations -- Hungary and Poland -- were among the top 10 countries, Tachikawa told the audience. The number of local subsidiaries of Japanese manufacturers in the region has more than doubled during the past five years, he added. In the 15 years since the end of communist rule, the region has become a major manufacturing base for European, Japanese and other Asian automakers, including Volkswagen, Renault, Fiat, Toyota, Suzuki, Hyundai and Daewoo. Poland hosts production facilities of European, American and Asian manufacturers of household electrical goods such as refrigerators, washing machines and air conditioners. The Czech Republic has become a key production base for the world's computer industry while Hungary has attracted large amounts of investment from information technology firms, Tachikawa said. In the run-up to their EU accession in 2004, the Central and East European countries offered incentives to foreign manufacturers to make them more attractive than their counterparts in the west, including establishment of special economic zones, reduction/exemption of corporate tax, and lower tariffs on imports of production facilities, he said. The foreign manufacturers in turn were attracted by the low-cost, highly educated labor in the region, where wage levels were one-fifth to one-sixth of Western Europe, Tachikawa said. Under the association agreements signed with the prospective members, the EU basically eliminated tariffs to imports from those countries in 1997, giving investors in the region tariff-free access to the EU market, he added. How has the investment environment changed since their accession to the EU? As one of the positive changes, Tachikawa pointed to improved logistics efficiency due to simplified customs procedures, including border checks on cargo, between the new members and the rest of the union. He also cited greater transparency of legal systems due to harmonization to EU standards, as well as infrastructure improvement with the use of EU funds for less developed members. On the other hand, the accession has obliged the Central and East European countries to either scale down or abolish the investment incentives to conform to the framework of EU competition policy, Tachikawa said. For example, they have had to discontinue the exemption of customs tariffs on imports of production equipment. Conformity to EU standards resulted in tightened regulations, including those on the environment, he said. Tachikawa also pointed to the sharp rise in personnel costs in the Central and East European countries, with some estimates showing that wage levels in the region have doubled in the 10 years since 1995. A JETRO survey shows that labor costs in Budapest, which were one-seventh of those in Dusseldorf, Germany, three years ago, have increased to one-fourth the level, he said. But the figures also show that the new EU members still retain a steep labor cost advantage over the old members, he added. The rising costs put the new EU members at a comparative disadvantage against non-EU members in the area such as Romania and Ukraine, which has prompted them to shift the target of investment promotion from labor-intensive sectors to knowledge-intensive sectors such as service industries and research and development, Tachikawa said. Foreign investment in the service sector is in fact on the rise, including the establishment of a shared service center of Philips in Poland, a British Telecom call center in Hungary and regional headquarters of Hewlett-Packard in the Czech Republic, he said. Investment in automobile sectors has continued after the accession, including the recent new projects by Kia and PSA Peugeot Citroen in Slovakia and Hyundai in the Czech Republic. Tachikawa also pointed to a series of investments by liquid crystal display TV makers and component manufacturers, many of them in the Czech Republic and Poland. While labor costs in the Central and East European countries are higher than in China, they still retain an advantage in terms of their access to the European market because many of the products manufactured in the region are for consumption in Europe, Tachikawa said. Overall, Tachikawa said Central and Eastern Europe will remain a promising region. The lingering huge economic gap with the old EU members to the west means that they have the potential for continued high growth, he said. Average growth rate in the region between 2005 and 2007 is estimated to be in the 4 percent range, compared to 2 percent in Western Europe, he added. Is bigger better for European Union?The European Union's historic expansion in May 2004 took eight new Central and East European members into its fold. But what has the process Einitially started in the early 1990s following the fall of the Berlin Wall Ebrought to the former communist countries in the Soviet bloc? And two years after the expansion, many EU countries appear to be gripped with "enlargement fatigue." Will it be a temporary phenomena or will it affect the region's long-term future? These were among the questions addressed by panelists during the July 19 symposium at Keidanren Kaikan, organized jointly by the Keizai Koho Center and the Japanese-German Center Berlin under the theme, "Transition and attractiveness of Central and Eastern European markets in enlargement of the EU." In May 2004, the EU expanded its membership to 25 by admitting eight former communist countries Ethe Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia Ealong with Cyprus and Malta. For some of the new members, the process for accession began as early as in 1991, when Hungary, Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia signed association agreements with the EU. "What did we get from the EU in those 15 years? The most important thing .EE was the purpose to carry out necessary but painful reforms," said Marek Belka, former prime minister of Poland and executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. "The driving force behind pro-market reforms in all these countries was the prospect of membership." According to Belka, the essence of the 1991 association agreement was that the future EU members obliged themselves to gradually introduce the common body of EU law and regulations. "Every piece of legislation passed in Poland after this date had to conform (to the EU laws and regulations) and if not we were to explain why and impose a certain escape clause or transition period," he said. "The implicit deal between the EU and accession countries was that, 'OK, we'll accept you, but you have to do everything possible, or even more than possible, to modernize, and we'll help you,'E he added. In the run-up to the accession, Poland and other prospective members got enhanced status as future EU members, which carried better ratings and more foreign direct investment, Belka said. They received policy know-how from the EU as well as financial assistance, but what was much more important was this "purpose" to reform, he told the audience.
Many Central and East European countries changed governments every two years and ruling parties frequently alternated, but "what we had was a general continuity of economic policies, because of a broad political consensus behind reforms (supported) by this prospect of (EU) membership," Belka noted. According to Belka, the cost of accession, in the case of Poland, was "mainly psychological and social." "Every change is painful, even a change for the better, and if you have a major change or systemic change, you're going to have losers and winners. The problem is that losers perceive it very clearly .EE and losers scream much louder than winners. "The social cost of transition was quite heavy because we had to do in 15 years what took 50 years or maybe 300 years in some other countries, and I'm not exaggerating," he noted. Unfounded fears
What has happened since May 2004? Many of the economic fears forecast before the accession Einflation and budgetary crisis Edid not materialize, Belka said. Poland and other new members received increased investor interest and more tourism. While the opening of the EU labor market remains partial today as some old members decided to delay accepting workers from the new entrants, Belka said it seems the outflow of the labor force toward Western Europe is gaining momentum, at least in Poland. A brain drain can be a serious problem once the EU labor market opening accelerates, he said. Better access to Western European education institutions triggered a flood of youths from the new member countries taking up education in the west not only in universities but in high schools, he added. Belka brushed aside the fear voiced by Euroskeptics who argued that Central and Eastern Europe, after taking orders from Moscow, were now losing sovereignty to Brussels "because the significance of new EU member countries like Poland or Hungary has increased only after joining the EU." Alfred Steinherr, director of the department of macroanalysis and forecasting at the German Institute for Economic Research, described the EU enlargement as a "success story" in the sense that the Central and Eastern Europe countries have successfully shed their former socialist characteristics Ealbeit to varying degrees Eand achieved a transition to market economy. "The new EU members are a diverse group of countries some are more successful than others but they all share one thing in their diversity that they are successfully converging," Steinherr told the audience. One remarkable feature about reforms in the new EU members, Steinherr said, is that they did not simply try to copy the leading economies of old Europe. "When they moved away from the socialist camp, most of them thought that the job was simply to copy and paste, to become like the leading countries of old Europe. But the more they looked (to their neighbors in the west) the more they realized that it might not be the best idea .EE that you have to do something a bit more challenging, you have to become better than them," he said.
The most remarkable example is Estonia, which created an institutional framework and built a much more flexible labor market, Steinherr noted. Steinherr also lauded the new member countries for not imitating old Europe in trying to protect national industries, citing the example of Hungary, which decided to allow foreign institutions to take over its financial business as a way to quickly improve efficiency in the sector. Such reforms would not have been imaginable in old EU members, he said, adding that Hungary and others that followed "got a reasonable, well-performing financial sector much quicker than if they had tried on their own." Bigger and better?
What has changed in the EU as a whole as a result of the 2004 enlargement? Belka noted that the economic impact was limited because despite the addition of countries with a combined population of 75 million, their combined gross domestic product accounted for only 5 percent of the total GDP of the EU. But he emphasized that the enlargement has redefined the EU's foreign policy agenda. "The eastward enlargement made countries like Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Turkey immediate neighbors of the European Union not just distant neighbors with whom we could discuss all sorts of partnership relations, but immediate neighbors with which we share borders," Belka said. He pointed out that the Orange Revolution in Ukraine took place only a few months after the enlargement. "I think it was the Polish accession that prompted immediate EU involvement in an attempt to solve the crisis in Kiev," he said. The second consequence of enlargement probably more important from an economic viewpoint is the change in policy discourse, Belka told the audience. "Suddenly the accession of 10 rather tiny economies with divergent recent economic histories prompted discussion on issues like flat tax, pension reforms, labor market flexibility and so on. .EE We became more liberal in a sense," he said. 'Enlargement fatigue'
One of the major topics among the speakers was the so-called "enlargement fatigue" that has spread across Europe following the historic expansion. Michael Reiterer, charge d'affaires of the delegation of the European Commission to Japan, said it is extremely important to recognize the strategic value of the process of enlargement "especially in the face of recent indications of 'enlargement fatigue' across Europe." While he stressed that the enlargement that brought the 10 new members was a "success," resulting in positive economic effects to new and old EU members, Reiterer said it was "time to build a new consensus on the process of enlargement, which should enhance the EU's self-interest in extending the zone of peace and prosperity in Europe while at the same time ensuring the EU's capacity to function effectively." He admitted that the EU "has become more cautious about taking on new commitments" for accession, although he emphasized that it is "absolutely willing to honor its existing commitments already in process" for Bulgaria and Romania. The 2005 Accession Treaty says the two countries will join the EU in January 2007, although the European Council may decide to postpone the accession for a year. Despite the growing wariness toward accepting more new members, Reiterer said it would be "unwise" for the EU not to use enlargement as its "most effective policy tool" to promote transformation of the countries involved. Belka said that the 2004 enlargement was a "success that nobody was really well prepared in Western Europe to consume and digest." "Many politicians started thinking, 'Well, we have to do something, we have to appease our electorate and we have to say what are the limits of Europe," he said. Belka said an agreement at a recent Council of Europe meeting Ethat the absorptive capacity of the EU and public opinion will be considered when making decisions on future enlargement Ewill in fact put some brakes on the process. "But I'm not that pessimistic because Europeans have to digest the two shocks that they have gone through recently the introduction of the euro and the enlargement." Belka said that the new member countries themselves are also hit by "fatigue" following their accession a fatigue from reforms. "We are tired, too. We have achieved a lot in 15 years and people think that the stakes are now lower in politics, that the political consensus that was behind the reform process throughout the whole transition period is now broken. "For populist politicians it's a bonanza. You can say whatever you want, they're not going to kick us out of the EU," he said, suggesting that such sentiments are behind the results of recent elections in some new member states that marked setbacks for reformists. But Belka said he believes that it is a temporary hiccup "because the positive effects of the (EU) membership will dominate, overwhelm fears and will civilize the most populist trends."
7月29日 Are we scapegoats of "nampa" culture ?As usual, i was having lunch in my most favourite cafeteria in campus. I was totally obsessed with my reading until loud, giggling voice started striking my mind. Staring forward, there are two girls exchanging words jovially, walking towards me,apparently approaching the seat besides me. Seconds later, I turned back to my reading. Be sitted, they continued their conversation all the way. From their accent, obviously, i murmured under my breath, they are taiwanese. As i understand what they were saying, i was kind of distracted. Their conversation were somehow interesting, mainly on Taiwan renowned tourist attraction spots. I Myself has been hankering for taiwan travel. Thats the reason i kept listening to them. I guess they had no idea at all that someone next to them could understand 200% of their chatting. When i got ready to leave, half standing, i spoke to them in chinese: " your story are pretty cool ! Are you guys taiwanese ? How are you doing ? " One of the girl looked like really surprised and nodded with a forced smile. The other just looked down, kept silence, totally ignoring me, so-called Mr Who. The situation was really awkward. Seconds ago, they were totally engrossed in their chit-chatting delightedly. Now, total silence !!! Oh not somebody got to break the ice ......I tried to smile to them but to no avail. Frankly speaking, that was a total embarrassment. I waved to them and walking away from the spot.
My american friend had the same situation while we are queuing up for our lunch , again in the same cafeteria. He asked the white girl that happened to stand behind us. " Do you speak english ? " The girl just nodded and her face turned gloomy. Then she started to look somewhere else, showing that she was trying to ignore us.
I'm sure some of you in Japan may face the same situation. There is a culture in Japan called "nampa" where guy will approach a girl and ask her to hang out togeher, eventually the final purpose tends to be one night stand . Many girls start to take precaution by shunning dialogue with strangers.Apparently , I and my american friend were scapegoats of this irritating culture.
Making-friend-everywhere-casually environment is totally retarded by this culture. Even the most friendly kind of person will be gradually affected if kept exposed to it. The culture is deeply rooted as my campus is no exception too. ( Well we had our accident in my campus cafeteria ) Are there any remedy for this ? Stop the nampa culture .....my most earnest pleading ......
7月28日 postindustrial economyJapan should embrace transition to a postindustrial economy, which will require the nation to review its traditional way of doing business as well as its education system, professors from U.S. business schools told a recent symposium in Tokyo. All advanced industrialized economies, rather than resist the trend, should recognize that their future is not in traditional manufacturing, they said. Meanwhile, emerging economies like China and India are not content with making low-end, labor-intensive products but are investing heavily in human capital to move up the value chain, they added. Six professors from business schools in the United States took part in the July 14 symposium at Keidanren Kaikan, organized by Keizai Koho Center under the theme, "Management and innovation that increase corporate value." Edward Leamer, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, said the transition from an industrial economy powered by manufacturing sectors to a postindustrial economy started in the U.S. in the 1970s, when the share of manufacturing in total American jobs began to sharply decline. Today, the share is down to about 11 percent. In the U.S., contribution to GDP of the sectors that represented the traditional work of high-school graduates -- manufacturing as well as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, transportation and warehousing, etc. -- fell from roughly 40 percent right after the end of World War II to about 15 percent in 2002, he said. The decline, he noted, has been offset by the growth of postindustrial, intellectual service activities like finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing, education services, health care, information and so forth. "So we're not a society that builds things any more," Leamer said. The question, he added, is how to change business organizations and societies from a focus on manufacturing "as a source of wealth creation." Leamer emphasized that the trend is not just limited to the U.S. but common to most other OECD economies -- albeit to widely varying degrees -- as measured by the share of manufacturing in total employment. Unlike the U.S., the share of manufacturing in total jobs in Japan was relatively stable during the 1970s and '80s but began steadily declining in the early 1990s, Leamer pointed out. "That's the point where Japan started to enter the postindustrial period. . . . That's the point from which Japan has to solve a new economic problem" of how to create value in the intellectual services, he observed. So far, the U.S. is the only country that appears to have made a successful transition to a postindustrial economy, Leamer said, citing labor productivity data as evidence. During the period between the end of World War II and 1970 -- when employment in manufacturing was rising -- U.S. productivity or business output per hour was growing by 3.1 percent a year on average, he said. Between 1970 and 1998, the annual productivity growth slowed to 1.7 percent because the transition to a postindustrial economy required difficult business, educational and social adjustments that took time, he said. But U.S. productivity has since started picking up again and is growing at 3.4 percent a year -- due largely to progress in information technology that pushed up the productivity of workers in intellectual service activities, he noted. Leamer said one key feature of a postindustrial society is that it can create much greater income inequality among workers than during the 20th century industrialization, which tended to eliminate the gap between individuals. That may partly be illustrated by the nature of a key tool in the postindustrial economy -- personal computers -- he said, as he posed a question, "Is a personal computer like a forklift or a microphone? "A forklift allows you and me -- no matter how strong you are -- to lift the same amount with a little bit of training, so we get paid the same, because we're equally good at operating the equipment," he said. "That's the metaphor for innovations in an industrial age. Most of the equipment in manufacturing had that character -- it adds to productivity but tends to eliminate differences between individuals." On the other hand, a microphone does not help a man sing well if he cannot sing, Leamer said. But if the equipment is given to a talented singer, it could help the person record CDs and make a fortune, he added. "It does not matter who drives the forklift, but it matters a lot who sings on the microphone, and it matters greatly who types on a computer keyboard. . . . The personal computer, which enhances everyone's productivity, has a tremendous productivity improvement effect on the most talented individuals. "The 20th century was a period of economic improvements at every level of income distribution, but the postindustrial economies of the 21st century will inevitably have much greater income inequality," he said. What does all this mean for Japan? Leamer argued that Japan should recognize that its future growth is not in manufacturing -- although Japan will retain important manufacturing sectors in its global operations. "You've got to start to create value in the postindustrial intellectual service activities. And as long as you cling to that myth that the 1990s was a macroeconomic disturbance, and now that macroeconomic policy is back to normal, that you're going to get growth again, that's denying the fact that fundamental adjustments have to be made," he said. Companies need to review the traditional way of doing business, he said. "The hierarchical command-and-control enterprises work well in manufacturing, but not in postindustrial intellectual activities," he said. "There's a difference between Detroit and Hollywood. Detroit is a top-down, hierarchical command-and-control type of a community. Hollywood, where they create content, is a bottom-up relationship-based entrepreneur-type community." And most importantly, Leamer said, Japan and the U.S. need to recognize that the sources of wealth in the postindustrial age "are not the factories and equipment that they used to be, but they are human problem-solving abilities." Therefore, he said, Japan will need an education system that shifts away from rote-learning to creation of graduates who can solve problems. Roger Noll, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, pointed out that emerging economies like China and India have invested heavily in building human capital as a key component of their development strategy to move up the value chain. "They see that education, research and development, and technology can be just as important for them as it's been for (the advanced industrialized economies)," Noll told the symposium. These countries have a "very long-term and farsighted" development policy of building higher education institutions "to make them world class in educating students and in doing basic research, creating national research centers that are oriented toward more practical applications of new knowledge in science and technology to business development," he said. "China is not just sitting on, making low-end manufacturing products," he said, although labor-intensive manufacturing operations will continue to account for a large portion of employment growth in the country. Noll said it is remarkable that growth in India, which has in fact not oriented itself much to exports of manufactured goods, is concentrated on businesses associated with medium to high-technology inputs. "The Indian Institutes of Technology are world-class engineering education institutions. . . . (The U.S.) imports their graduates to run our Silicon Valley companies," he said, adding that it is not surprising that Indian cities like Bangalore keep the IIT graduates for their rapid growth in information technology sectors. "The newly industrializing countries are not only going to be producing textiles and shoes. They are going to be producing everything, and they are going to have a major say in almost all manufacturing sectors" because they see that as part of their overall economic strategy, Noll said. "They have the beginnings of human capital to nurture and they are expanding and developing it by major investments in research and development and higher education." This, he said, does not mean that advanced industrialized economies should pack their bags and let the emerging economies take over. While the industrialized countries should not resist the transition to a postindustrial period, they need to "make certain that aspects of what we are about that got us to where we are -- our innovativeness, knowledge, flexibility and creativity -- are nourished and supported so that they do not wither away," he noted. Heather Haveman, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, meanwhile expressed doubts that Japanese firms will ever converge on the North American model of corporate governance, employment relations, technological standards and values despite the growing pressures of globalization. Globalization will certainly increase competitive pressures on Japanese firms, she said. "You have to run fast (to remain competitive). . . . You have to innovate more, develop better products and services, and improve your production and distribution systems." But Haveman said that there is another type of pressure from globalization -- to conform to a single set of standards to fit the environment in which one's exchange partner companies, many of them foreign, operate -- that may elude Japanese firms. This is partly because Japan's international trade network is simultaneously global and regional, she said. How can the North American model be the one on which Japanese firms will converge when Asia accounts for half of their global trade, she asked. Another reason is that historically, the direction of influence between Japan and the U.S. in terms of corporate management has frequently changed -- depending on the relative economic performance of one over the other, Haveman said. When Japanese firms outperformed their American counterparts during the 1980s, the Americans imitated the Japanese model -- as represented by such concepts as quality circles, just-in-time inventory control and a cooperative union-management relationship, she said. Then the direction of influence again changed when American firms started to outperform the Japanese during the 1990s, she added.
7月25日 Virtual Cockpit View Promises Safer Air TravelFARNBOROUGH, England (AP) -- Nail-biting blind landings in foul weather may soon be a lot less perilous, thanks to a new corporate jet technology that could also find its way into airliner cockpits. At the Farnborough Airshow this week, Gulfstream became the first executive plane maker to offer the system, which displays a computer-generated view of the terrain ahead -- even in heavy fog or cloud, when the ground can be invisible to the most advanced infra-red sensors. Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. claimed that the so-called Synthetic Vision System, or SVS, will result in ''more accurate tactical flight decisions by pilots and ultimately increased safety.'' The Honeywell equipment chosen by Gulfstream is a highly detailed, three-dimensional satellite navigation display for planes. Without SVS, satellite navigation already enables pilots to pinpoint their position and avoid some hazards -- but not to carry out landing approaches or other precision maneuvers in low visibility. Instead of the traditional blue-over-brown artificial horizon, a pilot using the new display sees an ever-changing virtual view from the cockpit -- overlaid with the familiar altitude, attitude, speed and heading indicators. Despite appearances, it is nothing like a video game, Honeywell Vice President Robert Smith said in an interview. ''This is not Microsoft Flight Simulator.'' The software draws on an extensive global database of runways and obstacles, superimposed on global terrain mapping data gathered by the space shuttle Endeavor in a February 2000 radar survey of Earth's surface. Like in-car systems, it can also incorporate real-time traffic information from other sources, flashing up collision-avoidance warnings when planes are nearby or when the runway ahead is already in use. Gulfstream expects to get the required certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in 2007. Spokesman Robert Baugniet declined to give any information on the pricing of the system -- to be sold as an optional upgrade to the company's G350, G450, G500 and G550 business jets. The FAA initially had reservations about the safety of SVS displays, but has come to see the benefits, officials say. ''They could potentially reduce accidents of the type that often happen in bad weather, at night or in limited visibility,'' FAA spokeswoman Alison Duquette said. Bad weather is often a factor in the loss-of-control incidents that were responsible for 91 percent of fatal air accidents in 2005, according to the administration's figures. Nevertheless, there are still concerns that in some situations, pilots could be lulled into a false sense of security by the SVS -- which does not itself detect potential obstacles in a plane's path, such as other aircraft or runway obstructions. ''Synthetic Vision may be so compelling that pilots try to use it beyond the intended function,'' the FAA cautioned in December 2005 guidelines. But experts predict the technology will save lives, particularly during low-visibility landings at smaller airports without state-of-the-art instrument landing systems -- or those where mountains or other obstacles force pilots to follow difficult approach paths.
''It enables you to fly very much more accurately for the sector of the approach on which most aircraft are lost during non-precision landings,'' said David Learmount, operations and safety editor with London-based Flight International. ''It's absolutely brilliant for business jets -- the whole idea of a business jet is to be able to fly safely to any airfield you like, including small regional airports.'' The airports served by airlines typically already have sophisticated instrument landing systems that guide passenger jets in to land at night and in low visibility. Nevertheless, Honeywell and its competitors were hoping SVS will eventually catch on with commercial carriers. Advocates say the technology could help avoid accidents such as the 1997 crash in Guam, when a Korean Air 747 plowed into a rocky hillside while attempting to land in rain, killing 228 people. A report concluded that problems with the airport's low-altitude warning device may have been a factor. ''We've talked to virtually everyone,'' Honeywell's Smith said. ''They're certainly looking at these systems.'' SVS could appear in airliners around 2012-2014, he said, declining to elaborate on discussions with other aircraft makers and airlines. Rockwell Collins Inc., another U.S. avionics maker, is developing its own SVS displays and also expects demand from airlines and from another of its regular customers -- the U.S. Air Force. ''We also see military applications,'' company spokesman Nancy Welsh said. ''Imagine you're flying in a brown-out (thick dust cloud) in Iraq. Synthetic vision might be quite useful.'' Biotech Blue JeansIn a sneak peek of what could be fashion's future, leggy models draped in dresses by designers like Oscar de la Renta and Versace strut their stuff on the runway. But this is no Paris or New York fashion show. Rather, the scene is a Toronto biotechnology conference and the dresses are made from a new fiber called Ingeo, made largely from genetically engineered corn. The Biotechnology Industry Organization used the fashion statement last week to burnish its battered image as an environmental scourge. Biotechnology is quietly playing a growing role in an apparel industry waking up to its customers' concerns about the environment and the country's reliance on the foreign oil used to make synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon. But the trend is raising concerns among some environmental purists who oppose genetically engineered crops of any kind. ''Ingeo still supports genetically engineered crops and we really view it as a slippery slope,'' said Jill Dumain of Ventura, Calif.-based Patagonia Inc., which pays a premium to use only organic cotton in its clothes. But other clothiers are developing biodegradable fabrics from natural fibers that have their start as genetically engineered crops. Of course, cotton is still by far the most popular natural fiber. But chances are even the T-shirt you're wearing is made at least partly from genetically engineered crops. That's because 52 percent of cotton grown last year was genetically engineered with a bacteria gene to resist bugs without the need for pesticides, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Now, with more apparel manufacturers turning to Ingeo, more clothes on the rack will have gotten their start in a gene lab. Nearly half the nation's corn crops are genetically engineered to withstand sprayings of a popular weed killer. NatureWorks LLC, the Nebraska company that turns corn into Ingeo, said it doesn't separate the genetically engineered crop from the conventionally grown crop that comes into its factory. So there's a good chance that just about every Ingeo product is derived, at least in part, from genetically engineered corn. ''We think there is a tremendous future for it, particularly because the consumer world is starting to wake up and recognize that it makes sense to employ some of these different materials as an alternative to both energy and fabric,'' said Martin Dudziak, research director for Linda Loudermilk Inc., a designer making Ingeo clothes. Depending on how it's finally used, the fiber can feel like cotton or polyester. ''It has all of the attributes of polyester,'' said Steve Davies of NatureWorks, ''and is much more environmentally friendly.'' Early next year, Linda Loudermilk will begin selling five different items, including jeans, made from Ingeo. Many other clothing companies, such as the sock maker Fox River Mills Inc. of Osage, Iowa, plan to follow suit.
Biotech's largely unseen hand in creating natural fibers has set off a debate among apparel makers who consider themselves environmentally sensitive. Many critics of agricultural biotechnology -- from organic farmers to the Sierra Club -- fear the engineered crops will co-mingle with conventionally grown plants. Others draw a distinction between genetic engineering in food crops and those used in fashion. ''Would I prefer that the world was nothing but organic agriculture? Yes,'' said Leslie Hoffmann, director of the nonprofit environmental group Earth Pledge, which hosted the Toronto fashion show and staged a similar event in April at the biotechnology industry's annual convention in Chicago. ''But on the other hand, (genetically engineered crops) have a much higher yield per acre and use less pesticides,'' she said. There are even plans to develop for the U.S. market corn-based, disposable diapers that biodegrade quickly rather than filling landfills for decades. An Ingeo diaper is already being sold in Italy and Spain, but making an inexpensive diaper to compete with disposable products in the United States remains a hurdle. NatureWorks makes the raw materials for Ingeo, fermenting sugar extracted from corn and turning it into plastic-like pellets that are made into the fabric sold to apparel makers like Linda Loudermilk. Other uses for NatureWorks' pellets include the produce packaging found in Wal-Mart stores. But the small subsidiary of food and agricultural products company Cargill Inc. sees a big future cracking into the $181 billion apparel industry with its pellets. NatureWorks declined to discuss Ingeo sales figures. Because NatureWorks doesn't separate the genetically engineered corn from the conventionally grown corn, it can't serve companies who demand biotech-free Ingeo. For its European customers, who are notoriously averse to genetically engineered crops, the company promises to buy an amount of organic corn equal to the amount of corn it took to produce their Ingeo orders. That still isn't enough for some environmental purists. ''They can't separate it,'' said Patagonia's Dumain, ''and that's our problem.'' On the Net: Biotechnology Industry Organization: http://www.bio.org Wireless Wonder ChipHewlett-Packard's announcement earlier this week that it's working on a miniscule wireless chip, called Memory Spot, has prompted some experts to speculate that the device could revolutionize how digital information is stored and shared. The chip -- which is half the size of a grain of rice -- can hold up to four megabits of information, enough for minutes of audio, short video clips, or hundreds of pages of text. Because it's so small, and potentially cheap, HP's chip can be either attached to or embedded in various objects, including paper, says Howard Taub, vice president of research at HP. For instance, by using a device called a reader to extract the information stored on the chip, Memory Spot could provide an audio clip for a photo, a revision history of a paper document, or supplementary video footage to explain a complex topic in a text book. It has the ability to "make paper or a document more dynamic," he says. Additionally, the chip could be beneficial in the health-care and pharmaceutical industries, for example, in hospital wristbands to hold a patient's medical history and keep track of doctors' notes and the patient's progress, potentially reducing errors. Also, if encoded with information and attached to a bottle of pills, it could verify a drug's authenticity, as well as provide instructions and information about side effects and harmful interactions. Although Memory Spot is currently a research project and HP does not yet have plans to commercialize it, the chip could eventually be sold for $1 or less, according to Taub, and Memory Spot readers could be available on cell phones, PDAs, and printers. HP's chip is based on technology called a radio-frequency identification device, or RFID, which consists of a small chip and a wireless antenna. RFID tags are used in merchandising as a replacement for bar codes. Although much RFID research has been aimed at increasing the range of the readers so that tags can be read from more than 20 feet away, the HP researchers tried to solve a different problem. The group wanted to know how it could "store more on the smallest chip," says Taub. Memory Spot and traditional RFID share a couple of features: both contain data and wirelessly transmit it, and both can operate without a battery. HP's chip and some types of RFIDs harvest energy from a reader when it comes within range. When an electrical current on the RFID reader comes near the RFID antenna, it causes current to flow in the circuitry of the tag or chip, allowing stored data to be accessed. But conventional battery-free RFIDs can hold only a few kilobits of information, useful for storing a product code, for instance, but not much else. Also, this data can usually be programmed into the tag's memory just once. In contrast, Memory Spot can hold up to four megabits of data in Flash memory, and information can be written, deleted, and rewritten to its memory many times.
The most technically challenging aspect of the Memory Spot project, explains Taub, was to integrate all of the components -- an antenna, a modem, memory, and a processor -- onto a chip less than a millimeter wide. All the components are placed in a specific configuration to keep the antenna from interfering with circuitry in the rest of the device. Part of the reason this high capacity is possible, explains Taub, is the wireless frequency used to transmit data to and from a tag via the Memory Spot reader. The chip's antenna and reader operate at the 2.45 gigahertz frequency band, which is used in Wi-Fi, while most RFID tags use 13.56 megahertz. By operating in Wi-Fi range, significantly more bandwidth is available to send data from chip to reader, resulting in transmission rates of 10 megabits per second, much faster than traditional RFID. Data transfer speed is a crucial feature because "people wouldn't want to wait around for a couple of seconds while the reader is reading the chip," he says. Additionally, how data is transmitted is an important consideration, says John Waters, a researcher at HP Labs in Bristol, U.K. who worked on the project. "We have specifically designed a scheme that...requires a minimum amount of circuitry in the chip to function," he says. The HP announcement is another step in the evolution of wireless, ubiquitous computing, says Lionel Lavallee, senior RFID solution architect at Intel. Looking back at the types of RFID available a few years ago, the devices were fairly distinct, he says, and could be broken into a few categories: passive RFIDs that use power from the reader and hold only a small amount of data; active RFIDs that have more computing power and memory, but also use batteries that have a limited lifetime; and battery-powered sensors that collect information from the environment. "Now you're seeing a continuum of all the technologies bleeding together," he says. "You get this cross pollination that grabs the best bits of both worlds." Lavallee predicts that RFID will finally start to become widely adopted in businesses in the next 12 months. "Right now we're at a tipping point," he says. Standard RFID technology will start to become commonplace, showing up in hospitals to track patients and treatments, in pharmaceuticals to prevent counterfeiting, and increasingly on products to replace bar codes. And Memory Spot could add another set of applications to wireless chips because of its much greater memory capacity and battery-free longevity. Still, HP's chip will not completely replace traditional RFID, suggests Taub, since it's more expensive than conventional RFID tags, which can cost less than 10 cents each. Additionally, not all applications -- for example, authenticating a shipment of flip-flops for Wal-Mart -- would need so much memory. Nonetheless, the chip's relatively large storage capacity makes it an ideal candidate for some wireless technology and applications. While it was conceived as a way to add audio to photographs, says Taub, he can envision attaching the chip to a postcard, to send pictures of vacations to family and friends, or being used in textbooks to create media-rich environments. At this early stage, however, it's not clear what applications Memory Spot will be best suited for, if it does make it out of the lab. "It's hard to predict a killer app until it's released in the marketplace," says Rajit Gadh, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA and a specialist in RFID technology. But he's encouraged by the capabilities of the HP chip and expects that one of its most exciting applications will be for storing and sharing digital media. "I think this is a very positive development for the field of RFID," he says, "with the possibility of creating new markets, such as media streaming content over passive RFID." Energy from the SeaIn the October 1978 issue of TR, William F. Whitmore invoked an idea from the 19th century: ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC. Exploiting the temperature difference between the sun-heated surface of tropical waters and the chilled depths thousands of feet below, Whitmore argued, could provide clean, renewable energy in the lower latitudes. In the tropics, the oceans store an immense amount of energy from the sun. The band of surface water within 10º of the equator basks around at 80º F., while cold regions 3,000 ft. below are around 40º F. [OTEC] uses this thermal gradient, like the hot and cold terminals of a gas turbine, to generate electricity. The essence of the system is the circulation of a fluid such as ammonia or propane. Where it comes near the warm water it is brought to a boil and so expands; where it comes near the cold, it liquefies once again. In the course of its circulation from one place to another, it drives a power-generating turbine. A typical closed-loop system would include two exchangers (evaporator and condenser), a turbine, and a generator. ... The engineering challenges to be bridged demand solutions of scale rather than of technical innovation. Ship designs and structures used for offshore oil platforms have blazed the trail for the physical platform on which OTEC will be mounted. A general design goal is to isolate the platform as much as possible from the influence of the ocean surface, where the interaction of wind and wave can induce violent platform motions. A leading candidate is a large spar buoy configuration, with most of the platform mass several hundred feet underwater and a relatively small surfacepiercing mast for access; this would also give warning to marine traffic. The OTEC system, with power cabled to shore, is necessarily fixed in place. Both steel and concrete are considered as possible platform construction materials. In the 1990s, 250-kilowatt test facilities in Hawaii's tropical waters demonstrated OTEC's feasibility. For a plant to be commercially viable in the United States, however, it would have to produce between 50 and 100 megawatts. Developing such plants would require "patient financing," according to Luis Vega, test director of the largest test plant operated by the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research, which ran the Hawaiian facilities. The first step would be a prototype plant of a few megawatts. Ultimately, Vega believes, not only would a commercial-scale OTEC plant be viable, but it could operate at six to eight cents per kilowatt-hour, making it competitive with other renewable energy sources and even with fossil-fuel plants. But for now, the oceans remain untapped. Cutting corporate taxes best course for JapanThe government's 2006 basic policy on economic and fiscal management and structural reforms, approved by the Cabinet on July 7, established two national pillars of economic policy for the coming decade -- the pursuit of growth in a shrinking population, and the rebuilding of state finances to reinforce the nation's fiscal sustainability. To return to fiscal health, it is imperative for both the national and local governments to maximize efficiency and pare expenses. Also, more efforts at revenue reform will be needed to achieve the state's goal of a "primary balance," where expenditures excluding interest payments and debt redemption can be covered by revenues -- excluding bonds -- by 2011. But it would not be a good idea to resort to tax hikes to secure more revenue. Nations with companies that compete against Japanese firms on a global basis usually provide favorable corporate tax rates to give them a competitive edge. What would happen if Japan raised corporate taxes? Tax hikes may produce temporary revenue boosts, but they can also cause longer-term damage by cooling off the nation's economic engine, which is just warming up. According to an outline of government revenues and expenditures for fiscal 2005, corporate tax revenue marked its third year-on-year increase in a row, while income tax and consumption revenues also posted sharp gains. Overall, tax revenue exceeded the initial budget by as much as 5 trillion yen -- due chiefly to the economic recovery. This proves tax cuts stimulate the economy and subsequently lead to more tax revenues. In fact, tax incentives for research and development, as well as information technology investment -- both of which were beefed up in the fiscal 2003 tax reforms -- contributed a great deal to energizing the economy. Tax deductions to promote R&D -- the root of innovation -- are important as Japan aims to become an even more advanced science and technology-oriented nation. One estimate shows that the R&D tax measure adopted in fiscal 2003 would push up Japan's gross domestic product by 3.4 trillion yen within three years of implementation. Aggressive IT investment is also key if Japanese firms are to prevail over fierce international competition, and tax incentives for such investment create strong economic effects. To fundamentally revamp the international competitiveness of Japanese firms, corporate tax rates need to be lowered. This should not be considered a self-centered request from the corporate sector. Reducing the tax burden on companies will have a far-reaching positive effect on the economy. Tax cuts lead to greater cash flow, which would allow companies to distribute more income to shareholders and employees, increasing consumer spending. In its efforts to regain fiscal health and build a sustainable social security system, the government, aided by the ongoing slashing of expenditures, should pursue a natural gain in tax revenue via economic growth. This should start with corporate tax cuts to make firms globally competitive. 7月21日 1チップ化でワンセグとの共存を目指す--もう1つのケータイ放送「MediaFLO」MediaFLOは、6MHzの周波数帯域を使用し、ストリーミングコンテンツや「蓄積型クリップキャスト」と呼ばれるダウンロード型コンテンツ、音楽、データ通信などを載せる放送型サービス。FLOは「Forward Link Only」の略で、通信ではなく局から送られてくる放送型のサービスであることを打ち出している。最大でストリーミング放送が20チャネル、蓄積型クリップキャストならば40チャネルを同時に送信可能だ。課金などのデータについては、携帯電話のネットワークを経由してやり取りする。
携帯電話でTVを見るというと、ワンセグとどこが違うのかと思うだろう。実際、見た目ではさほど違いはない。だが、ワンセグが当面は無料で地上波デジタルと同じ内容を送信する、TV放送の携帯電話版であるのに対し、MediaFLOは当初から課金ベースであり、多チャネルでダウンロードが可能であるなど、CATVやCSに近いサービスを目指している。
米国ではQualcommが事業主体となって、2006年10月からのサービス開始を目指している。周波数は716~722MHzをオークションにて入手済みであり、Qualcommが各地に放送用鉄塔を立て、最大50KWという大電力で放送する。鉄塔がTV放送用並みに高いこと、電波が大出力であることから米国全土を網羅するのに300から400基の基地局を用意すればよいという。
サービスコンテンツやアプリケーションについては2005年7月にFLO Forumを設立して、標準化を進めている。FLO Forumには2006年6月時点で46社が加入しており、メンバーにはKDDI、京セラ、シャープ、三洋電機といった日本企業も参画している。小菅氏は「標準化によって日本企業の海外進出をうながし、(チップセットの)ロット数を増やすことで低価格化を実現したい」と述べた。
日本では、クアルコムジャパンとKDDI、ソフトバンクなどが事業化に向けた企画会社を設立している。しかし、周波数が割り当てられるのかどうかといった点から、未知数の部分は大きい。
TV動画配信という点で、どうしてもMediaFLOはワンセグのライバルとみなされがちだ。これに対し、2007年初頭にリリースが予定されている第2世代のFLOチップセットでは、ワンセグにも対応する。ワンチップでMediaFLOとワンセグを統合することでコストダウンを実現し、両者の共存と棲み分けを目指すという。また、小菅氏は既存のキャリアやコンテンツプロバイダなどの枠組みを壊さず、ユーザーの選択肢を広げるという方向をとっていることを強調した。 Intel quad-core chips arriving in 2006Intel's quad-core chips actually are packages consisting of two dual-core chips, but each package plugs into a single processor socket. AMD, whose quad-core chips are due in mid-2007, uses a more refined design with all the cores on a single slice of silicon.
Intel has advanced several schedules recently. Its "Woodcrest" Xeon chip for dual-processor servers went on sale in the second quarter instead of the fourth, and its "Tulsa" Xeon for four-processor servers also is arriving sooner. Nortel wins Verizon Wireless upgradeNortel said on Wednesday that it will supply Verizon Wireless with equipment that will increase the speed and capacity of Verizon's 3G mobile network. Specifically, Verizon will use products based on CDMA 1xEV-DO Revision A technology beginning in the third quarter of 2006. This new technology provides data speeds significantly faster than current capabilities, about 3.1 megabits per second for downloads and 1.8Mbps for uploads. Current 3G networks on average provide speeds between 400 Kilobits per second and 700Kbps. Higher data speeds are needed for new bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive applications, such as video and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for mobile devices. Financial details of the agreement have not been disclosed. Nortel has been supplying equipment to Verizon's nationwide wireless network for more than a decade. Verizon is currently testing applications on Nortel's EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) Revision A technology, including push-to-talk, fixed mobile convergence, VoIP and messaging services. #textCarousel {width:140px;border-color:#630;border-width:2px;border-style:solid;padding:10px;float:right;margin:15px 0 15px 15px;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:-150px top;} #textCarousel li {font-size:95%;line-height:1em;margin-bottom:10px;} #textCarousel h4 {margin:0 0 5px 0;font-size:110%;} "Nortel's solution allows Verizon Wireless to introduce new, real-time services such as video and other streaming media that rely on quality-of-services capabilities," Doug Wolff, vice president and general manager for CDMA solutions at Nortel, said in a statement. "These new services provide a very powerful end-user experience that increases customer loyalty."
The agreement with Verizon follows on the heels of another major announcement this week by Nortel. On Tuesday, the networking company and Microsoft announced a strategic alliance to develop, market and sell IP communications products to large companies. |
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