Take a look at these short video clips I recorded:

Her name is “GeminoidF” and she was developed by the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in Osaka University. Her expression is so real it’s almost creepy, yet you just can’t stop looking at her.

While I was standing away from the display to get out of other people who started gathering around, one of the staff (probably the lab member?) told me to get closer to the display. He said that her motion is activated by the input captured by Kinect and webcam which are set up behind her. I thought it was interesting that he said if you overdo it she’ll start ignoring you – so don’t make any big/unusual movement.

As amazing as it was to see this in real life, the novelty of android mannequin may go away after a while. Though I still think it’s surprisingly capturing to have a human-like figure in front of you in comparison to some kind of digital interactive display.

What if she can respond to what you say? What if she is more responsive to your movement or even expression? I think these androids have a good potential of capturing people’s attention if they can perfect the response/feedback mechanism (which they are already trying to do with this display experiment too).

Related Links

• More photos (by me)
• YouTube Video on this Display
• YouTube Video on Female Android Geminoid F

I wonder what will the future of the blog contents/presentation look like.
Related: Post-Artifact Books and Publishing by Craig Mod

• Reporting affects news. It’s inevitable how something is reported transforms the truth.
• Journalists tend to only pay attention to new things. News is always an exception to a rule.
• We are relying on media to hear about the paralysis in journalism.
• Since references to shared values is required, the fact can’t be received in the exact same way across cultures.
• News coverage has been limited in terms of airtime, paper/magazine pages. There is no easy cure for the imperfect world with tool and time restraints.

Share Your Learning Curve

He offers one way of reinventing journalism, which is what he calls “sharing your learning curve”.

• When you don’t understand something at all, you lose interest.
• If you know well about something, the same kind of knowledge is not valuable news to you.
• By sharing your learning curve and having conversation, you can offer the readers some pegs to hang their knowledge on.

He is practicing this method on his Banking Blog on the Guardian site. There’s a good video on this topic, his session at TEDｘAmsterdam:

His book title in Japanese translates to “This is How World Misunderstands”. I feel I’m drawing in information every day, but feeling that I still don’t know enough. His talk encouraged me to accept that status and keep learning while sharing what I know from my point of view.

It’s been a long while since I’ve been to one of these, not since my elementary school years. You can take all kinds of things that you used to decorate your house, office, or car for welcoming the new year. When I was a kid, I remember burning Japanese calligraphy work I did for the first time in the year too.

Shooting the flag at the top

The purpose of the festival is to send off the god of the year (Toshigami/歳神) which was greeted with those special decoration. It’s also a practical event – you get a chance to clean up and switch your mind to the after-holiday mode.

Burning a small bunch of twigs to take home

Firetruck on standby, good idea.

Anbo Port and the moon

Related:

• Dondo Yaki (どんど焼き) (kenleewrites in 日本)
• Customs and traditions of Japan – Dondo Yaki

Here are some photos to illustrate this time of the year in Japan:

You can send 年賀状 (Nengajo, New Year’s greeting cards) ahead of time to be delivered on January 1st. Just use one of these pre-stamped post cards or write in the word “年賀 (Nenga)” beneath any stamp. I wonder if there is any other country that does this.

Wikipedia says:

(T)his custom existed for people to tell others whom they did not often meet that they were alive and well.

Now that I think of this, it’s kind of like a Facebook Poke that only comes once a year. Twitter went down for New Year’s greetings and Japanese phone carriers advised not to call or text families and friends right after the midnight to avoid overload. Maybe we need a Nenga mark for that kind of communication to queue up greeting messages.

Had お節 (Osechi) dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s like a fancy bento boxes with stuff you don’t really eat every day. In December I went to a department store in Tokyo and found there are Osechi sets with price tags over 31K JPY (= $40K) for 3 of the boxes similar to the size of those shown here. This one we had isn’t even close, but Osechi for New Year’s is a serious business in Japan. Not a good idea to mess it up.

Mom placed a bunch of flower arrangements throughout the house yesterday. Some flowers came from Mom and Grandpa’s garden.

In the afternoon we went to Yakushima Taisha Shrine.

For more photos from my trip, check out my Flickr set.

In 2011, I:

Blogged from 43 different locations

According to the tag cloud of my photo blog, where I posted 128 times this year. If I have to choose my favorite place I blogged from this year, it was the Central Park lawn. Well, I actually can’t decide over that or Saratoga Springs. I’m not focusing on posting often per se, but I want to keep recording events and thoughts in my days however brief.

In August, I posted most photos – 24 times – and I love the archive page of that month:

I also translated 51 WordPress.com News posts at ja.blog.wordpress.com, published 20 posts on ja.wordpress.org, 14 posts on tech.a-listers.jp, and 28 posts on ja.naoko.cc. Not so many actual “blog posts” (rather than bookmark links) on this blog, which I want to work on more next year.

Ran ~300 km in 8 months

According to Nike+. Disclaimer: I missed recording probably a handful of times & I’m not certain if my old iPhone was recording the distance correctly. So the number could be somewhat off (I’m really not sure if I can run 1km in 4:18 as it suggests).

I started running in May. I’m not at all proud of my record for the past couple of months, but I’m happy that I am continuing this effort. I want to run a half marathon at least once next year, not for the sake of competition but for keeping myself more motivated. The graphic below is from my page on the Nike+ web site.

Took 13 trips over 112 days

According to TripIt. This was my first year living in Tokyo but I just realized that I only spent a third of it there. I got to go to many great cities for WordCamps and Automattic company meetups.

The map below is taken from Dopplr with the same travel data (but not just in 2011). Time to start traveling outside of Japan/US/Europe, maybe? Though I’m not planning on setting a goal to go to more cities/countries next year, I want to take at least one personal trip to somewhere I’ve never been to.

Gave 9 Presentations

According to Slideshare (excluding a couple each of small meetups & company meetup flash talks). Most viewed slides were the one for WordCamp Kobe (3909 times). One of my goals next year is to improve my presentation skill. I was really inspired by a colleague who did this by joining Toastmasters, which I want to try next year.

I do realize I have a lot to do in the upcoming 365 days, but I want try not to make myself “too busy” with everything. Thank you for those who supported me throughout the year.

Have a happy new year!

Sessions

We had 3 tracks (users/blogger, designers & engineer) for this WordCamp. As introduced on WordCamp Central blog post, the topics were well-rounded.

Sessions include responsive publishing, mobile site development, e-publishing, performance optimization, and WordPress coding best practices.

We tried to arrange the timetable so that everyone has at least one session they are interested in. The result was a huge success I think, in fact I read several blog reports complaining that they had such a hard time choosing which ones to go!

WordPress in Japan has been growing and I am feeling that in each WordCamp. It’s showing not only in the number of the attendees, but the depths of the interests and availability of the speaker. For example, I think only a handful of people were interested in scaling WordPress, say, 2 or 3 years ago in Japan. Now there are numbers of agencies using WordPress to run large-scale sites as their CMS. In addition to topics listed earlier in this post, there were talks about contents strategy, security, blogger panel discussion, theme / plugin usage tips, analytics, and WordPress for beginners.

Automattic colleague Takashi Irie & I did a hands-on session

John Ford, VaultPress engineer did a talk on behind the scenes of WordPress.com

Attendees

I was happy to see seniors, people with kids, students, women as well as men at the event. They were amazingly cooperative in terms of operation. It seemed like a good reflection of WordPress community itself – everyone pitches in, and help each other. 80% of the registrants actually showed up, which is really amazing rate considering it was a free event.

Full house for a mobile session

Staff & Speakers & Sponsors & WordCamp Foundation

Just want to say they all were awesome. Thank you — even though I know whatever I say is never going to be enough. This was the first time we (any Japanese WordCamp organizer) worked with WordPress Foundation to make the event happen based on some of the new rules and process that are being set up. There were some bumps since we’ve never done it this way, but learn as we go — I think the trial and error will be useful lessons for future WordCamps here and else. I’m really happy to see the support and staff poured into the Foundation and WordCamp.

Handmade Wapuu, Japanese WordPress character. Yes, they are handmade!

Staff wore orange T's!

Here’s my slides from the keynote, where I talked about WordPress’ history, current status and future prospect (slides are in Japanese).

Ustream recording is already up but it also is in Japanese. John Ford of VaultPress did a session in English. Here’s his blog post (with slides) and video.

If you’re interested in seeing more feedback (maybe with Google Translate), here are a couple of links:

• Bookmarks of the attendee & staff’s blog posts
• “Togetter” Tweet collections (afternoon only, but still has over 1500 tweets)
• wctokyo2011 tag on Flickr

The photo credits goes to @odyssey, who had a WordPress baby just a few days ago and @makegoodtime, who worked hard on the official event site. Thanks!

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.