Are Japan’s tech glory days over?

Arguments pro and con in the UK Indpendent, via Japundit.

Wanted: A revolution in auto retailing

Wired wonders whether the auto industry can learn from the Apple Store and develop a new model of retailing.

Auction of Michael Jackson’s possessions cancelled

The New York Times reports that the planned sale of art and other items from Neverland Ranch has been cancelled.  I blogged about the auction when it was originally announced.

Inauguration: Metro and porta-potties

Metro will charge rush-hour fares most of the day January 20. A commemorative one-day pass will be available for $10 in early January.

5,000 porta-potties will be available around the Mall and on the parade route.

Inauguration concerns: Adequate preparation? Too many people?

This is a collection of links to articles from the last week in the Washington Post about preparations for the inauguration of President-elect Obama on January 20: 

Inauguration Watch is the Post’s group blog on the event, preparations, etc.

This December 10 editorial calls attention to the expectations for unprecedented numbers of attendees, and the diffuse responsibilities for planning in the areas of security, transportation, etc.

This article covers the charter bus situation. They are expecting 10,000.

Over 600,000 people from the Atlanta area alone?

Metro can accommodate up to 960,000 riders over an eight-hour period.

Editorial urging the DC Council to reconsider its decision to allow bars to stay open until 5AM over the inaugural weekend.

Alot of things are in play here:

(1) The historic nature of the event and unprecedented interest that people have in attending.

(2) The standard operating procedure for planning inaugural events, which features decentralized responsibility and coordination among various Federal and local entities, such as the Secret Service, DC government, Metro, the President-Elect’s office, etc.

(3) The tendency for some parts of the business community, such as hotels and restaurants, to see this as a rare opportunity to make money.

The result appears to be a reluctance for the media or officialdom to discourage anyone from coming or raise serious concerns, despite the apparent inability for DC’s infrastructure to house, transport, or otherwise accommodate anywhere near the number of people expected in the upper range of attendance estimates. The Post’s editorial admonishments are pretty mild so far.

As someone who lives in the area, I really hope we can get it together and put on a great event that lives up to the historic moment.

Quick Update: This CNN article indicates that Federal and local officials monitoring airline and hotel reservation levels believe that the estimates of 4-5 million attendees are too high.

Japanese perspective on food security

This post links to an interesting video from Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries about the Japanese diet and food security.

It’s a clever presentation of the familiar “buy Japanese” message couched in concerns about health and sustainability. The argument goes like this: If the Japanese people just go back eating a traditional Japanese diet of food produced mainly in Japan, their health would improve, it would contribute to global food security, and agricultural communities would be revitalized.

There are some legitimate points there, but a few of the questions/contradictions glossed over include:

• How to reconcile the heavy consumption of fish in the traditional Japanese diet with the sustainability of global fisheries.
• The health benefits of increased consumption of animal proteins by the Japanese since World War II.
• The role of Japan’s agricultural policies in limiting long-term productivity gains in Japanese farming.
• Benefits of trade and globalization for developing country agriculture.
• The cost of increased food self-sufficiency to Japanese consumers.

Similar self-sufficiency/anti-globalization arguments can be made on behalf of any number of economic interests in Japan and elsewhere (e.g. the Detroit 3 arguing for “car self-sufficiency”). 

Debate about WordPressDirect

This post on Mashable describes the marketing effort associated with WordPressDirect, which allows quick creation and maintenance of search engine-optimized blogs around search terms provided by the user.

The controversy revolves around WordPressDirect’s automated content generation, and whether this feature simply enables spamblogging or represents a legitimate tool for bloggers. There’s an interesting debate in the comments of the Mashable post which includes WordPressDirect reps. The arguments illuminate some of the issues raised by commercializing aspects of Web 2.0. From Stephen Downes.

The market and the economy: How bad will they get?

A couple interesting reads on the stock market and the economy from last week.

This piece from last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal (November 20) by former hedge-fund manager Andy Kessler enumerates some factors that will contribute to selling pressure for the remainder of the year and into January, including tax-loss selling, hedge-fund redemptions, margin calls, and new mutual fund managers reworking portfolios.

This article by Nouriel Roubini in Forbes lays out a case for why it will be difficult for the U.S. consumer to jumpstart a quick recovery. Roubini predicts a cumulative fall in GDP of 10% from its peak, about three times as bad as the worst post World War II recession (1957-58), and says it is preferable for this drop to occur over a longer period (4 years rather than 2).

Neuroscientists trying to understand and treat psychopathy

This interesting article in the New Yorker describes how neuroscientists are scanning and studying the brains of psychopathic inmates in the hope that treatments might be developed.  Via Boing Boing.

Movie: Battle Royale

Battle Royale is perhaps the best known Japanese cult film of recent years. It was released originally in Japan in 2000. Directed by the late Kinji Fukasaku, one of the great directors of 60s and 70s yakuza movies, the movie is based on a novel by Koshun Takami.  In a near-future Japan where kids are unruly, a class of 9th graders is shipped to an island and thrown into a contest in which they are forced to kill each other off over the course of a couple days until only one remains.  

Except for a few minor plot anomalies that come from translating the book to film, this works very well as an action-thriller. There’s quite a bit of violence, as you might expect, but it’s not all that over the top. Well-acted (Beat Takeshi is great as the kids’ former teacher, who oversees the whole thing), nicely paced.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars (outstanding, merits repeat viewing)