So when the event was held this year in Taipei, what did Yahoo! Taiwan do? They hired lapdancers. Needless to say, a lot of people formerly affiliated with Yahoo!’s developer programs — already smarting from the lack of females in technology — were pretty pissed. (Full disclosure: I also previously worked at Yahoo!.) But a quick straw poll from the Taiwanese members of 8Asians kinda shrugged it off: one commenter on Gawker even noted that “being Taiwanese, all I can say is this is considered harmless fun in Taiwan and is culturally OK.” Also, people completely up in arms about this: your outrage should have started last year.

Is this an example of Yahoo! Taiwan completely going over the line? Or is this truly just a cultural thing?

A loyal reader pointed us to this latest Sony commercial. In an ever-increasing field of HDTV manufacturers, Sony has been making the case that it’s worth buying their brand and claims, “You can’t fake Sony quality. It makes watching sports in HD better.”

Justin Timberlake chimes that the more sports you watch on a Sony, the better you get at sports (while playing a mean Forrest Gump-like match of table tennis with quarterback Payton Manning). A claim like this is actually somewhat plausible — especially watching individual sports like golf or tennis.

However, Manning then claims that watching HD on a Sony has also improved his Chinese in Chinese. Now unless Manning is watching a lot of Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, I have a hard time believing that a product from a Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer such as Sony will improve my Chinese. And Timberlake’s Chinese is just God awful – is he even trying? His feeble attempt at Chinese is almost as bad as Rosie O’Donnell’s (okay, maybe not that bad).

Chinese can be a difficult language to learn, especially given its tonal nature as well as learning Chinese characters. I have to imagine that had Manning and Timberlake claimed that watching a Sony would improve their linguistic abilities with another Indo-European language besides English, the commercial just wouldn’t be as funny.

I have to admit, I thought the commercial was funny. And Timberlake can be quite the comedian. But I have to wonder, are we going to see more Chinese and Chinese families being the comedic twist in commercials, television and movies as China and Chinese language grows in global prominence and popularity? If watching HDTV can improve my Chinese, I should be completely fluent by now!  Personally, my favorite Sony Bravia TV ad was an ad of bouncing balls in San Francisco that was ironically only aired in Western Europe.

h/t: David

Honda has developed a new personal mobility technology, U3-X. It is a compact experimental device that fits comfortably between the riders legs, to provide free movement in all directions just as in human walking forward, backward, side-to-side, and diagonally.

Lest one assumes that this is for lazy, fat-assed Americans, this prototype is actually addressing a coming need in Japan, one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world, and concerns about how the elderly get around. It can stand upright unaided and the rider sits on it as they would a stool, with their feet on footrests. The unicycle maintains its balance as it scoots around at (slow) speeds of up to 3.7mph.

The U3-X, shaped liked the number eight with a wheel at the bottom and seat at the top, was unveiled [Thursday] to reporters in Japan. The wheel comprises a series of smaller motorised wheels within a larger one, which enables the rider to manoeuvre sideways as well as forwards and backwards by leaning their body in the direction they want to go. [full story with another video]

Let’s face it. I love this thing because it’s shaped like the number 8! But unlike the Segway, which I thought was uber cool when I first saw it, I don’t feel like it’s a toy I’d buy for the fun of it. I guess if I had mobility issues, something like this would be a godsend, so Honda will continue research and development of the device including experiments in a real-world environment to verify the practicality of the device.

h/t: John

We have talked previously about Asian American YouTube Celebrities like HappySlip and KevJumba and how a new generation of Asian Americans are using YouTube to create their own work that speaks to and reaches Asian Americans (and others too).  Higa has even parlayed his YouTube fame into a movie that was shown in theatres around the country.  Many well known Asian Americans on YouTube hang out and network together and are seemingly dominant (they joke about token white people here at 4:30).  The attraction to YouTube doesn’t surprise me seeing how Asian Americans are often washed out of traditional media.  Taking advantage of technology that make it easier to produce and distribute your own work makes a lot of sense, and many do take advantage.

I personally find nigahiga to be hit or miss – some of his videos are really funny to me while others are not.  Speaking of #1’s, another Asian has been the #1 in Australia  for a while.  Natalie Tran’s CommunityChannel has been the most subscribed in Australia for some time now.  I like this vlog about how she goes as Starbuck to a Sci-Fi type convention, but people think she’s Boomer because she’s Asian.

Ever since I saw the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics with a man flying on a jetpack, I’ve always wondered when I could have one of my own. Behold, Canadian-based JetLev, founded by Chinese Canadian Raymond Li. JetLev’s “jetpack” is actually a water-powered jet pack that can launch users 30 feet into the air by pumping water through a tethered 30-foot cable powered by a jet ski motor, and will only set you back a mere $130,000. Now I know what I want after I buy my Segway.

Actually, Green Dam Youth Escort (绿坝·花季护航) is “content-control software” developed in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Ostensibly designed to block pornography, Green Dam can actually be used to block other content, as well. A week ago China announced that as of July 1, 2009, all computers sold in China must be installed with Green Dam. Under the guise of screening out pornography, its true main purpose is for the PRC government to censor and spy on its citizens. Not only does Green Dam automatically download the latest updates of a list of prohibited sites from an online database, it also collects private user data.

Due to a public backlash to its original announcement, the PRC government later announced that the installation of the software is “optional.” While much of the outcry from users and computer manufacturers was surrounding issues of censorship, the real reason for the PRC’s about-face is because there are many security flaws within the software that allows hackers to take over computers. In fact, typical of what you might expect from China, a place where piracy of all kinds runs rampant, it turns out that Green Dam is built upon copyright and open source violations. ZDNet Government reports that Green Dam not only rips off Cybersitter software from Solid Oak, but that it also uses open source code without proper attribution.

Outside of the security vulnerabilities and its copied source code, Green Dam also has a number of major functional defects. From Wikipedia:

Green Dam Youth Escort recognizes pornographic images by analyzing skin-coloured regions, complemented by human face recognition. However, according to a Southern Weekly article, the software is incapable of recognizing pictures of nudity featuring black- or red-skinned characters but sensitive enough to images with large patches of yellow that it censors promotional images of the film Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. The article also cited an expert saying that the software’s misrecognition of “inappropriate contents” in applications including Microsoft Word can lead it to forcefully close those applications without notifying the user, and so cause data losses.

Wikipedia shows a photo of pigs, banned because the pink pigs “matched” the color of human skin.

Not surprisingly, says ZDNet Government, “Chinese youth mock the Green Dam program, kidding each other that if they don’t behave, ‘I’ll youth-escort you.’ Anti-Green Dam websites and petitions are popular. And a Manga-style cartoon mocking the thought police has appeared: Green Dam Girl (绿坝娘).” Chinese blogger Hecaitou says that the images of Green Dam Girl show “the creativity of the post 80s generation (i.e. those born after 1980). The character carries a rabbit (the Green Dam software’s mascot), wears a River Crab badge (a pun about ‘harmonious society that Chinese netizens use to mock Internet censorship), and holds a bucket of paint (or soy sauce) to wipe out online filth.” Says Greenormal, “The police cap emblazoned with a crab, a pun on the Chinese word for “harmonious”, the government’s euphemism for a society without unrest, controversy or opposition.”

Despite the temporary “good news” that Green Dam is now “optional,” it is clear that the PRC government will not give up its intent to control internet speech. It will be up to global citizens to be vigilant and pressure the global computer companies to refuse to be collaborators of such government control.

It sounds like a major FAIL, all the way around. But I did get a chuckle out of the picture of Green Dam Girl pulling down Windows XP Girl’s underwear. Come on, you did, too… didn’t you?!

PS – I normally would not be using simplified Chinese characters, but this is an article about the PRC, so the proper names of these things do actually use this bastardized form of Chinese.
PPS – You think if 8Asians wasn’t already being banned by Green Dam that this post will get it done?

Yuck. So why would you do this on purpose? Supposedly, the belt actually helps you lose weight!

From Inventor Spot:

In effect, the structure of the rubber belt is a large mesh grid that splits the dieter’s belly, side and back fat into easily manageable blobs. This allows for increased metabolic consumption of calories and raises the propensity for increased blood flow values. More blood flow = more heat = more burning of fat. Got it? Good… What’s NOT good is that a multitude of fat blobs are squeezed out in a manner that disturbingly resembles mini-boobs.

If you really want to buy one, check out the Japanese Yahoo store which offers them.

Or, you can save yourself 4,000 yen and the trauma of seeing yourself as a blobular mess by just hopping on a treadmill, instead.

If you have cable or satellite you didn’t have to worry about the digital transition, unless you had someone speaking an Asian language in your home. While cable in the SF Bay Area has been pretty good about carrying some Asian language stations, it doesn’t carry all, and if you had satellite, it’s likely you didn’t have any Asian programming, without ordering a special second package for Asian language TV.

When my parents moved in with my family, after my dad got ill from cancer in 2005, I was faced with the dilemma of finding ways to bring Chinese language TV into my home. Over the air signals were never particularly satisfactory, especially living in San Jose trying to receive dim signals from San Francisco. So we stuck with cable which provided at least one Chinese language station most hours of the day.

Both my parents have since passed away, and I didn’t really bother with the digital TV transition until this past week, when we decided to buy a new flat screen panel TV with an integrated digital tuner. It happens to be mounted in the one location in the house where I don’t have cable run yet, so I stuck some ordinary rabbit ears on the TV to see what kind of reception I could get from an over-the-air signal. While we can’t receive any of the main broadcast networks, it turned out we get really clear PBS, Spanish language, and Asian language stations. To my surprise, I counted at least 5 different channels of Chinese language programming. If only my parents were still around to enjoy them.

If you still need assistance with the digital TV transition or for more information, visit DTV or DTV2009.

The newest ad campaign from Intel focuses less on their products — a microprocessor is always less sexy to market than an MP3 with shiny metallic surfaces and rounded corners anyway — and more on the engineers building their products. Take this latest global campaign with Ajay Bhatt, the creator of the USB port and current Intel Fellow and Chief Client Architect of their Mobile Platforms Group.

Except for one thing; that’s not Ajay Bhatt in their commercial; that’s an actor. And if you compare the engineer rock star to the real Ajay Bhatt, the actor looks — hmm, what’s the word we’re looking for, here? He looks more academic. And by academic, I mean “a stereotype of an Indian Engineer.”

According to Bhatt himself, he shrugs off not being part of the commercial due to “being busy,” but he’s an Intel Fellow, and he could be simply toeing the company line or agreeing to PR’s demands that a stereotypical Indian engineer should be playing the part. And if the actor who played him had classically good looks, Asian American blogs would rip the commercial apart for making him look like something he obviously isn’t. So what’s worse — that, or playing up to a stereotypical — and ultimately racialized — stereotype?