Category: japan |日本 | 일본

Yōkoso – welcome to the Japan category of this blog. This blog was inspired by my love of Japanese culture and their consumer trends. I was introduced to chambara films thanks to being a fan of Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Getting to watch Akira and Ghost In The Shell for the first time were seminal moments in my life. I was fortunate to have lived in Liverpool when the 051 was an arthouse cinema and later on going to the BFI in London on a regular basis.

Today this is where I share anything that relates to Japan, business issues, the Japanese people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Lawson launched a new brand collaboration with Nissan to sell a special edition Nissan Skyline GT-R. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Japan.

There is a lot of Japan-related content here. Japanese culture was one of odd the original inspirations for this blog hence my reference to chambara films in the blog name.

I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.

If there are any Japanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

OPEC + more things
OPEC

OPEC – the national cartel for oil producing countries is having a meeting this weekend. OPEC stands for Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. For me, OPEC is something from my childhood. I grew up in the aftermath of 1973 OPEC embargo.

The 1973 OPEC embargo

1973, a coalition of Arab countries launch an attack on Israel, with a view to regaining land that had been lost during the 1967. The OPEC embargo was targeted at nations that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War:
- Canada
- Japan
- Netherlands
- Portugal
- Rhodesia
- South Africa
- United Kingdom
- United States
The reality is that the impact was so much wider than just the embargoed countries. For instance, Ireland wasn’t targeted, yet was impacted heavily by OPEC’s action. The time was critical as well.

The oil shift

The west had moved from coal to oil after the Second World War. Societies followed the same energy path that Winston Churchill mapped out for the Royal Navy back in 1911 for many of the same reasons. Oil offered many benefits in a way that it provided double the thermal content of coal. Boilers in power stations could be smaller, trains and ships could go double the distance.

Countries like Japan and Ireland had moved from coal fired power stations towards oil fired power stations. Car ownership had taken off. Finally, the US had been on a journey from using domestically produced and nearby oil (via Canada and Venezuela), to rapidly increasing oil imports from 1970 onwards.

This gave the OPEC countries a lot of leverage. The embargo finished in 1974 but oil remained at $11/barrel.

1979 oil crisis

The Iranian Islamic revolution disrupted supplies of oil to the west. In late 1978, with the revolutionary fervour in the air foreign oil workers left Iran. Iran tried to use Navy personnel to keep things going. Then in 1979 the revolution succeeded and The Shah vacated his head of state role and left Iran with his family.

With the exception of the Gulf War oil production and pricing was stable through the 1990s.

OPEC back in the news

The Ukraine war gave Middle Eastern oil producers an increased amount of leverage as European oil and natural gas customers pivoted away from Russia as a supplier. Countries like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are investing for a post-oil economy with large infrastructure projects like Neom and need a $80/barrel in order to make their balance of payments.

Yet the oil price currently is too low. This has created a fractious relationship between OPEC and the business press, especially Reuters and Bloomberg who are banned from their meetings. A good of the reason why oil prices are so low is that China’s economy didn’t surge back, and fast growing economies like India and China are getting cheap Russian oil. And despite what the Saudis might want, the price of oil at the moment is more affected by demand, rather than supply-related issues.

Saudia Arabia itself as exasperated this as it has bought Russian diesel and resold it on in South East Asia at a higher price as an arbitrage play.

China

Jamie Dimon warns ‘uncertainty’ caused by Beijing could hit investor confidence | Financial Times – not sure Mr Dimon’s comments will go down that well in China

Spy agency warns Canadian MP that she’s on Beijing’s ‘evergreen’ target list – POLITICO and more on China’s continued security campaign in Canada; Erin O’Toole says CSIS has told him he was target of voter suppression and misinformation campaign by China – The Globe and Mail

China investigated Covid lab leak claims, says top scientist | Financial Times – Professor George Gao, former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a BBC Radio 4 podcast that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was checked by experts to see whether the facility could have been the source of the coronavirus pandemic. – to be fair just because you investigate it doesn’t mean its true. I would have expected them to consider all possible vectors

Economics

US-China trade war would hurt Britain most, says leaked analysis | Sunday Times – The analysis finds that the UK’s economy will suffer more than those of the US, EU and China in the event of a full-blown subsidies war. It says the UK cannot adopt “a wholesale activist industrial policy” like the US, EU or China because it is only a “mid-sized economy outside major trading blocs”. The UK does not have the same “fiscal capacity or economic strengths” as the world’s superpowers, the paper goes on to say – not terribly surprising given that it’s about scale. Even inside of the EU there are likely to be countries that are clear winners and losers

China developers: the main quake is over but the aftershocks are not | Financial Times – real estate still dragging on China’s economy

Ethics

Does Gender Diversity on Boards Really Boost Company Performance? – Knowledge at Wharton – Despite the intuitive appeal of the argument that gender diversity on the board improves company performance, research suggests otherwise. Results of numerous academic studies of the topic suggest that the presence of more female board members does not much improve — or worsen — a firm’s performance

Finance

Goldman Sachs’s China dealmaker stops tapping US investors | Financial Times – instead they look for funding for Chinese projects in the Middle East. See also Saudi Arabia in talks to join China-based ‘Brics bank’ | Financial Times

Centerview: the Wall St power brokers confronting a rare rupture | Financial Times

The Cleaner and the Laundromat: Belarusian Cleaning Magnate Allegedly Laundered Millions Through Disgraced Latvian Bank ABLV – OCCRP

Germany

Suspicious Activity: What Are German Fighter Pilots Doing in China? – DER SPIEGEL

Health

Klick Wire | US consumers trusting HCPs less – 25 – 34 year olds prefer to do their own research – trust but verify seems to be their approach

Coming to a hospital near you: 5G | Axios

Marketing

‘Secret Slowdown’ Threatens PR Firms After Buoyant Growth

Are Concave Ads More Persuasive? The Role of Immersion: Journal of Advertising: Vol 0, No 0 – more immersive ads might work better

Materials

Rich Rare Earth Elements Deposit Found in Americas | EPS News

Media

The Little Mermaid subjected to ‘review bombing’ with mass negative reactions posted by bots | Film | The Guardian – I know a number of Disney fans outside the US weren’t that keen but who would have the motivation to write a bot or has Amazon jumped the gun?

Online

Apparently Google isn’t responsible for the digital news echo chamber | Quartz

WordPress.com challenges Substack with launch of paid newsletters | TechCrunch

Security

SolarWinds: The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack | WIRED

Capita cyber-attack: 90 organisations report data breaches | Capita | The Guardian

Cybersecurity at Risk in Automotive Industry – EE Times

Japan’s leading cyber security expert Cartan McLaughlin gives an update on the current state of global cybersecurity and shares insights on how Japan can protect itself against the increasing wave of attacks. McLaughlin also answered questions on effective defense tools, whether Japan is catching up or falling behind, and Russian cyber attacks on Ukraine.

Words I never thought I would see myself writing together in the one sentence hacking and farming. Farming represents a large part of the US economy, and, food supply chain has national security aspects to it for obvious reasons.

Software

Simon Willison on how design can improve ChatGPT usage: ChatGPT should include inline tips

GitHub – datainsightat/introduction_llm: Explore the world of Large Language Models (LLMs) with this introductory repository.

China Merchants Group’s securities arm pulls out of tender offer for Microsoft AI services amid rising sensitivity | South China Morning Post – securities arm of state-owned conglomerate China Merchants Group (CMG) has scrapped its participation in a tender for artificial intelligence (AI) services provided by US tech giant Microsoft, according to a Monday post on the group’s website, highlighting the growing sensitivity for Chinese firms of sharing domestic data with foreign firms

The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess | Foreign Affairs

INFER Public | The Pub Blog – INFER forecasters: Don’t expect GPT-5 anytime soon

AI Job Loss: Study Predicts Women Hit Hardest | Tech News World

Taiwan

How Taiwan became the indispensable economy | FT

Technology

The Coming Wave of AI, and How Nvidia Dominants | Fabricated Knowledge

Generative AI silicon design challenge readies for fab | EE News Europe

Nvidia launches first commercial exascale supercomputer | EE Times

Are Chiplets Enough to Save Moore’s Law? – EE Times

Marvell Launches Interconnects on TSMC’s 3-nm Process – EE Times

Waterproof pressure sensor ensures 10-year availability – EDN

Web of no web

Maxar explores new uses for Earth observation satellites | Defense News

£50m for UK space infrastructure fund .| EE Times

Apple’s MR device will determine Cook’s place in company history – a bit like John Sculley and the Newton….

Partnership Takes Wi-Fi HaLow to the Next Level – EE Times
June 4, 2023
Giorgio Moroder

Giorgio Moroder introduction

David Hoffman spent decades making corporate films and documentaries, he has self-made films and footage such as this clip on Giorgio Moroder. If you’re younger than 30, Giorgio Moroder is the old guy who collaborated with Daft Punk on their album Random Access Memories. The story of Giorgio Moroder is larger and more complex than this.

Start to Musicland

At the time of writing 83 year old Moroder has spent over six decades in the music industry. Giorgio Moroder came from an artistic family in a small corner of what is now Italy, that spoke German and Italian. His brother Ulrich is a famous painter.

From the age of 18, Moroder worked as a musician and songwriter. He eventually got into sound engineering. He founded the Musicland Studios in Munich, which was a popular recording venue with even large artists like the Rolling Stones.

Songwriting

While Giorgio Moroder is most famous as an electronic music producer, he couldn’t have succeeded without songwriting. Before his success in electronic disco and after it, he was a successful songwriter. Through the 1960s and 1970s, artists often covered songs in different languages. In addition Moroder’s birthplace helped him to be multi-lingual. The royalties from these songs helped him build the production side of his business.

Moroder claimed that the song he was most proud of writing was Berlin’s Take My Breath Away – made famous by the original Top Gun movie.

Electronic production to disco

Musicland gave Moroder a base in the 1970s to start producing music. Here is where he started to record disco projects.

Munich Machine

One of the projects was Munich Machine – a mix of electronic music with session musicians and singers. Like a lot of European disco at the time it draws from latin music elements and even classical music, with a mix of original songs, interpolations of classics and high tempo cover versions of older pop. The original Munich Machine album art featured ‘Gundam’ type robots that sent my young imagination into overdrive. I saw them in the clouds on long journeys or in car parts my Dad had around the place. Munich machine went on to make three albums.

Munich Machine influenced a lot of hi-energy recordings, as well as British gay club culture like Almighty Records.

Productions done for artists that they worked closely with like Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Midnight Express movie soundtrack contribution The Chase were much more driven by synthesisers – rather than ‘traditional’ instruments supported by synthesisers. As disco record production budgets shrank away from the Salsoul orchestra-driven productions, electronics made dance music more financially viable and Moroder showed the way.

Recursion to Daft Punk

And in a further link back to disco Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter had a father who was a peer of Giorgio Moroder. Daniel Bangalter better known as Daniel Vangarde was a disco era writer producer who was behind Ottowan’s D.I.S.C.O. and The Cuban Brother’s Cuba with a more conventional disco sound. You can see Bangalter senior’s influence in the way Daft Punk wrote and produced music.

The David Hoffman clip era

The David Hoffman clip of Giorgio Moroder, shows his electronic studio set up I guess around the time of Giorgio Moroder’s E=MC2 album. In the same way that Bob Dylan’s 1965 move to incorporate electric instruments and rock sound into his previous accoustic folk sound shook things up, E=MC2 could also be considered to a similarly iconic moment.

Moroder and his studio partners created a pre-programmed, using only electronic sounds for the instruments. It was also described as first electronic live-to-digital album.

A quick aside on digital recordings

Japanese broadcaster NHK had a stereo digital recorder working in its research lab in 1969, Dr. Takeaki Anazawa of Denon and others had been doing digital recordings from 1971, these were live one-take recordings mostly of jazz and classical music music performances. Denon digital recorders went on record more jazz, classical and traditional Japanese music over the next couple of years. But it was only Sony’s PCM-1600 in 1978 that made digital recording viable for commercial recording studios.

Ry Cooder is the first popular music artist to make an album Bop Til You Drop as a digital recording using a custom-built 32 track digital tape machine by 3M.

It was in March of 1979 that Philips demonstrates its first compact disc player, a prototype called the Philips Pinkeltje. The first commercial production of compact discs was made in August 1982 and the first commercial compact disc players are launched on October 1, 1982 by Sony and Philips.

Recording E=MC2

Moroder uses US start-up Soundstream’s digital recorder, that makes use of computer tapes as its recording medium, which gives an indication of how forward looking Giorgio Moroder was at the time. (Soundstream goes out of business in 1983).

Moroder’s album was probably being recorded and produced by the time Sony launched their PCM-1600. E=MC2 was released at the end of August 1979.

Giorgio Moroder combined digital recordings with electronic instruments. On the album there are credits for ‘programming’ and computerised digital editing. This was a decade before DigiDesign (now AVID) launches its Sound Tools (which evolved into Pro Tools) software for computer-based audio recording, editing and mastering.

This was a few years before Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland proposed developing a standard way of communicating control instructions to instruments to Oberheim Electronics founder Tom Oberheim. This was seen as the starting point to come up with interoperable instrument instructions.

At the time when Moroder made E=MC2. Some instruments from the same company could control each other, but couldn’t control ones from other companies. It would be four years later before the first MIDI instruments would be launched for sale.

In addition, other instruments had no method of electronic control at all, which is why you see electronically actuated motors pushing instrument keys in the footage below.

Now all of this could have been done in software like Apple’s Garageband, but not in 1979. In fact, it would be 25 years before Apple launches Garageband.

Shusei Nagaoka

As another aside the original album artwork with Giogio Moroder wearing an electronic t-shirt was done by Japanese artist Shusei Nagaoka, famous for The Electric Light Orchestra’s (ELO) Out of The Blue cover art with its space opera visuals. The image that Hoffman uses below is from the remastered re-released version of E=MC2 without Nagaoka-san’s iconic artwork.

David Hoffman’s clip

May 28, 2023
Yamato + more stuff

Space Battleship Yamato

Space Battleship Yamato goes back to one of the most creative periods in Japanese animation or anime as its known. It develops a complex plot and covers themes such as honour, sacrifice, death and loss.

The show was originally made in three TV series and four movies from 1973 through to 1983. An additional five episodes were made from 2004 – 2007. There was a 2009 animated film reboot and a live action film the following year. It was then remade as two 26-episode TV series between 2014 and 2017 with the remakes of the original movies from 2021 onwards.

In addition, there were manga adaptions of the Yamato universe published in 1974 and 2000.

Star Blazers or Space Battleship Yamato also indicates the curious relationship that Japan has with its imperial legacy.

The Yamato was named after a Japanese province that’s the current Nara prefecture. The original Yamato and its sister ship the Musashi were the heaviest battleships ever built with the largest guns.

What these Japanese battleships lacked in numbers compared to the American navy, they made up for in firepower. Unfortunately for the Imperial Japanese Navy, the very nature of warfare at sea was changing with the rise of the aircraft carrier. The Yamato was sunk in the East China Sea along with five other warships as it sought to engage and slow down the US invasion fleet attacking Okinawa. The Musashi had been sunk the previous year off the coast of the Philippines.

In the story, earth is threatened by an alien race who irradiated the earth’s surface, requiring the survivors to live underground. A spaceship is needed to get help to undo the damage. There are clear analogues of the Cold War and the atomic bomb experience of Japan in the plot line, along with the popularity of disaster movies.

In order to make the spaceship christened Argo, the ship is built around the sunken wreck of the Yamato, joining the Japanese imperial past and pacifist present together.

Satellite and open source intelligence

Satellite technology improvements allowing more sensing capability to be fitted in a much smaller package is changing what can be done and reducing costs. The analogy of mainframe to personal computer movement with a 1000 fold increase in technological change is very interesting.

Progressive distortion

YouTuber Curious Droid asked the question Why is Older NASA Launch Film Footage Still the Best? The use of engineering cinematic film created some of the most iconic footage of the space race. It turns out that its a fascinating edge case of how film handles over exposure better than digital cameras reminded me of how analogue tape handles over peak levels compared to digital recording in a similarly progressive way. It seems film mirrors the progressive distortion of analogue audio recordings.

Sengoku burai (戦国無頼) aka Sword for Hire

The 1950s saw the resurgence of a confident and creative Japanese film industry. Sword for Hire is a classic example of a chambara film. The ronin character in chambara films is a prototype for the stranger that comes into town in western films.

May 19, 2023
UK economic hole + more things

UK Economic Hole

Will anything revive UK productivity? | Financial Times – I am not convinced that anything currently on the horizon will sort out the UK economic hole.

Former British prime minister Harold Macmillan

Verdoorn’s Law and Nicholas Kaldor

If we go back to 1949 Dutch economics Petrus Johannes Verdoorn came up with a law – the long run productivity generally grows proportionally to the square root of output. This law addresses the relationship between the growth of output and the growth of productivity. Faster growth in output increases productivity due to increased returns.

“in the long run a change in the volume of production, say about 10 per cent, tends to be associated with an average increase in labor productivity of 4.5 per cent.”
Causes of the Slow Growth in the United Kingdom Nicholas Kaldor (1966) Cambridge University Press

A heuristic called Vandoorn’s coefficient of 0.484 was found in estimates of the law following Vandoorn’s original publication. Nicholas Kaldor who made similar points as far back as 1960 in his work Essays on Value and Distribution. Kaldor built on Verdoorn’s Law observing that manufacturing was the best way of increasing output.

Slater, Walker Securities

The UK economic hole isn’t anything new. Back when I was a child we saw UK industry disappearing at about 1.5% of industrial capacity a month. The source of the destruction was apparent in the post war period, although manufacturing innovation had been underbanked and under invested for decades. Jim Slater and his financial vehicle Slater, Walker Securities was the harbinger of forces that unleashed the UK economic hole.

The State We’re In

Economics editor Will Hutton wrote the The State We’re In and I got to read it while I was in college. It caught the policy wonk zeitgeist of the future Blair administration – making the argument for long termism and manufacturing as a creator of wealth together with Keynesian economics.

Slow Growth Britain to Cool Britannia

Hutton wasn’t alone in his viewpoint but building on the expertise and experience. Wilfred Beckerman in his book Slow Growth in Britain: Causes & Consequences published in 1979 is a case in point. As you read these books the same points are made over and over again about what has become the UK economic hole. The discovery and exploitation of North Sea oil provided a sticking plaster from 1982 through to 1999. But production in UK oil and gas fields have been in decline since. Any economic productivity benefit provided to British industry through a massive shake out was transferred to unemployment relief. Secondly industrial eco-systems or ‘clusters’ as Richard Florida would term them in his work Who’s Your City? disappeared, causing the manufacturing base to lose critical mass. Any gains were largely spent by 1990. Manufacturing was a driver and a shock absorber for productivity related issues – this is important for the subsequent UK economic hole.

While Hutton was read by the future Blair administration they did little about it, due to the Augean task that confronted them.

Following the decline of manufacturing the UK, focused on financial services which turned toxic in 2006. There were additional smaller bets on professional services and the creative industry (remember pre-millennium awkwardness of Cool Britannia)? As an economic rational decision maker, I pivoted my career out of industry and into the creative sector – thankfully I was young enough to be able to do it. Many couldn’t and were trapped in low value services jobs or living on long term sickness benefits to massage unemployment figures.

Young tax-paying workers

The collapse of financial services saw the current productivity collapse and stagnation amplifying the long standing UK economic hole. Brexit could be seen as a wail of pain and anger. The reality was that being in the EU allowed cheaper skilled workers to move to the UK and use existing manufacturing plants for the likes of Cadbury’s and Unilever. So the UK benefited from young tax-paying Europeans, but lost out in terms of wage depression. Brexit severed that last gasp of productivity increases.

Business

Adidas: declining market share in China reflects growing strength of local brands | Financial Times – Xinjiang and also Adidas real world retail got hammered through COVID-19. Finally Chinese consumers want local brands over Adidas due to an increased sense of national pride

China

Canada considers expelling Chinese diplomats for targeting MP – BBC News and also worth reading in conjunction with Australia rethinks ‘quiet diplomacy’ tactic as Cheng Lei marks 1,000 days in Chinese detention | Australian foreign policy | The Guardian – Australia is rethinking how to help citizens embroiled in “hostage diplomacy” as it marks the 1,000th day of the journalist Cheng Lei’s detention in China. – good luck with that, it doesn’t take into account the securitisation of thinking in every aspect of China’s policies

China raids multiple offices of international consultancy Capvision | Financial Times – this follows on from raids on Mintz Group and Bain & Company. Capvision is kind of like GLG win that it connects international investors and management consultants with experts

Economics

For China’s ‘young refuseniks,’ finding love comes at too high a price — Radio Free Asia – Young people are avoiding marriage, having children and buying a home amid tanking economy, concerns about future. To be fair you can also see this in the west. The key difference is that this flies in the face of where the Communist Party wants them to behave

Energy

What is really driving ExxonMobil’s clean energy commitments? | Financial Times – the decades long algae biofuels programme failed. Back when I worked in the oil industry at the start of my work life, ExxonMobil had the best research and development / innovation team in the oil industry. They were way ahead of the likes of Shell or BP. The heuristic within the industry went something along the lines of: BP could find oil anywhere, Occidental could get a contract to drill anywhere, Shell could market any product successfully and ExxonMobil could out-innovate the rest of them.

Mobil 1 oil on the shelf at a motor factors courtesy of Mike Mozart

For instance Mobil were decades ahead of everyone else with their Mobil 1 synthetic lubricating oil back in 1974. Castrol was processing petroleum oil and calling it synthetic, they were eventually caught out in 1998 – with Mobil winning a moral victory if not a court case. The point is that if ExxonMobil can’t get algae to work, I doubt any company can – energy desperately needs its semiconductor moment.

Talking about a semiconductor moment, one of the places where this would be really welcome would be green hydrogen. I had hoped that Ireland would be able to convert its wind power bounty into generating hydrogen by electrolysis as a way of moving and storing energy in a way that electrical batteries can’t match.

FMCG

Nivea’s premiumisation strategy in China yielding success in face and body categories | Cosmetics Design – you can see an example of this in Nivea Cellular body wash – which shows a mix of product development and packaging innovation to create a premium offering.

Health

Only the Global-Health Emergency Has Ended – The Atlantic – “This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO – the cadence of an emergency might be finished but there is still subtantial health risk. It has declined to ‘only’ the fourth most common cause of death…

After weight loss, Alzheimer’s may be next frontier for drugs like Ozempic | Reuters – there are medical trials already underway

Klick Wire | HCPs prefer emails and ChatGPT is 10x more empathetic

Hong Kong femtech founders fight taboos and stigma, seek more investor support so city can rival Singapore as hub | South China Morning Post

Singapore based emergency nurses critique media and societal stereotypes and tropes.

Ideas

Why the U.S. should fight Cold War 2 – by Noah Smith

Japan

Japan’s ‘myth of security’ raises cyber attack risk | Financial Times

Luxury

Genesis G80 Electrified vs. BMW i4 M50 | MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報 – the G80 is closer to a 7 series than the i4 which is somewhere between the 3 and the 5 series. Overall I would prefer to go with a Genesis given the reliability issues that BMWs have had for the past two decades.

Materials

UCF Researcher Creates World’s First Energy-saving Paint – Inspired by Butterflies | University of Central Florida News

Media

Meta Has Lost The Pulse Of Its Customer Base As Automation Replaces Human Services | AdExchanger

What happens when quants go ‘Mad Men’ | Financial Times

Online

No smoke without fire for ByteDance’s US struggles

Philippines

More than 1,000 rescued in Pampanga ‘scam call center’ | ABS-CBN News – the Philippines have been doing their part in trying to combat transnational fraud

Security

TikTok spied on me. Why? | Financial Times

Exclusive: Chinese-made Hikvision CCTV cameras, accused of posing risk to national security, found on GCHQ building – Channel 4 News

Software

Volkswagen plans jobs shake-up at struggling software arm | Financial Times – it sounds like Symbian for cars, complete with the same organisational and project dysfunction. Read with Volkswagen’s troubled software division is getting new leadership. Again. | Ars Technica

Raycast – AI framework app for Mac users recommended by my friend Anthony Mayfield

Telecoms

The Disconnect on Undersea Cable Security – Lawfare – The fibre-optic submarine cable sector is a vital, but ignored, part of the world’s critical infrastructure. Many members of Congress and the U.S. government, see the risks to subsea cables quite differently than cable owners and manufacturers. Brookings Institute’s Joseph Keller examines this disconnect, suggesting ways that the policy community can protect and advance this critical industry.

Thailand

Thailand legalised cannabis and an industry boom occurred. A key part is trying to integrate and provide value to the country’s hospitality, tourism and travel sectors.

Web of no web

Qualcomm continues to strengthen its automotive offering – Qualcomm acquiring auto-chip maker Autotalks in $350-400 million deal | Ctech

Fourth Industrial Revolution slow to start in America – Asia Times

Wireless

India smartphone shipment declined 16% in 1Q23, Xiaomi saw more than 40% fall | DigiTimes – Vivo seems to be the preferred brand over Xiaomi

May 9, 2023
Training AI + more stuff

Training AI for fitness

Japanese sportswear brand Asics (アシックス) have launched a campaign that’s training AI to create more inclusive and representative images of fitness as an activity beyond über fit athletes.

Asics called these über fit representations exercise airbrushing.

https://youtu.be/eo13_v_Ase8

Generative AI is only as good as the source material that it gets to work from. And this has meant a lot of content that is heavily skewed what is the aggregate image. Think about the kind of content that already creates body dysmorphia across society. This can be corrected by training AI on a wider range of images.

In the words of Asics EMEA communications director Caroline Fisher

We’re training AI to see the real power of exercise.

Ask AI what exercise looks like and it’s likely to generate images of chiselled jaws, muscles on muscles and six-packs. Because AI has been taught that exercise is purely about aesthetic gain … and it’s learnt this from us.

This focus on exercise purely for physical transformation is feeding into unrealistic body standards and impacting our mental wellbeing.

In response, we’ve created an AI Training Programme to help AI learn what exercise really looks like. Our aim is to teach AI that the benefit of exercise is not just on the body, but also on the mind.

Everyone can help change the way AI sees exercise by posting their exercise images online with #TrainingAI and tagging ASICS.

To learn more, see the link in the comments.

We are ASICS. Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a Sound Mind in a Sound Body.
Caroline Fisher on LinkedIn

Five men of Edo

Another great mid-century chambara film to follow up the 47 Ronin that I shared in an earlier post.

Nissan borrows from YouTube culture

Nissan borrowed from the Lofi Girl YouTube channel to make this four hour advert for their new Ariya electric vehicle. The illustration is wonderfully done and there are Easter eggs buried in the Japanese driving scenes. From Nissan iconic model name drops to mecha and more.

Judi Oyama

Judi Oyama is a Japanese American skateboarder and graphic designer who was there at the beginning of Independent trucks and Santa Cruz boards. At 63 years old she’s still a pro-skater.

WWE on fan engagement

Interesting video having different generations of WWE wrestling stars talk about fan engagement at SXSW. Elements of what we’d call method acting were talked through by The Undertaker. The para-social links of fanbase and stars that has been amplified via social media.

Flow state

I wish I had watched this when I first started DJing. I did my best work when I was in a flow state. It is hard to get in it consistently.

China on war path

China’s rapid militarisation discussed by Singapore public broadcaster CNA (Channel News Asia). There are some interesting points in it.

May 7, 2023