A river of haze from China descends on Korea and Japan

The Chosun Ilbo English edition this morning ran a column entitled "Pollution from China is an International Problem."  I'll say, just take a look at the accompanying photo by NASA's Aqua satellite, taken in early March of this year. (click to see a full size version)  It shows a river of haze blowing across eastern China, Korea and Japan.  Photographs like this deserve to be given much wider circulation, so I'm doing my small part via this blog.
There are a number of global problems to be faced these days given the global scale of manufacturing, trade, and urbanization, but the air pollution problem in China is literally deadly.  The news reports from Harbin earlier this fall underscored the severity of the problem.   It is one that all the nations of Northeast Asia need to tackle soon, starting with the major sources of the fine particle pollutants that are so harmful--China.

1st ministerial forum on broadband development in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2013

Korea.net has published some coverage of the 1st Ministerial Forum on Broadband Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2013 at which I gave a keynote presentation.  I covered this in an earlier post, but Korea.net has a few photographs of the actual event.  Click on the accompanying photograph to see a full-size version.

Schmidt: hangul (한글) "in line with Google's mission"

Google chairman Eric Schmidt was in Seoul yesterday and, although he met with Samsung executives, perhaps the most important activity during his visit was a visit and press briefing at the Hangul Museum being built at the National Museum of Korea in Yongsan, central Seoul.  As reported in the Joongang Daily, "Schmidt held a press conference yesterday morning at the museum to announce a set of new partnership programs to help expand the user base of Hangul, Korea’s written language, including developing a Web program for learning it. Schmidt said King Sejong’s purpose in creating Hangul, which was to provide Korean people with a language essay to learn and use, is in line with Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”"
Google has already made some effort to publicize hangul to the world, including its use on Google's main search page on Hangul Day, a national holiday here in Korea, as shown in this 2011 post.  However, it can and should do much more, for several reasons.
Some years ago, a poll of academic experts on Korean culture published in the magazine Koreana showed that hangul was considered to be Korea's greatest cultural achievement.  A similar poll of the Korean people would no doubt produce similar results, as hangul is widely considered to be this nation's crowning cultural achievement.
Moreover, as I noted in a 2009 post, hangul has the following characteristics (I've updated the list slightly here to account for recent developments).

• Because it is so scientific and phonetic, it was an important factor in accelerating the uptake of computers, mobile phones and all sorts of digital electronic devices here. 
• It is possible to type much faster on a hangeul computer keyboard than on a qwerty English keyboard--much faster! This principle applies to smartphones and tablets as well. 
• Because Hangeul is alphabetic, it was conducive to the rapid development and growth of the graphics industry, which began back in the 1980's. Some of us remember when there were no Korean fonts, only hand calligraphy. 
• Literacy is an essential requirement for the information society and Hangeul helped promote it in Korea. For years now, South Korea has had near-universal literacy.

Despite the above realities, a 2003 report by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) entitled Broadband Korea: Internet Case Study, got it completely wrong.  In Section 1.2 of the report headed "What explains Korea's success," it claimed that "Another factor seemingly weighing against Korea’s ICT development islanguage. Koreans have their own language. Therefore, the country cannot easily leverage the vast amount of content developed in more widely spoken languages. The Korean alphabet, known as Han-gul, uses a pictographic font that is not ideally suited to computerization."  This blatant mistake in the ITU report is symptomatic of a larger problem, that treatment of Korea in the mainstream media around the world (and this carries over into internet content!) tends to be overwhelmed by the much larger volume of information about China and Japan, Korea's two larger neighbors.  Nowhere is this more evident than in efforts by the current Japanese government to claim that Dokdo, the Korean island in the East Sea, is part of Japan.   More on that in a future post.

Curved phones or build your own?

LG has followed market-leader Samsung by launching its own curved smartphone.  As shown in the accompanying  graphic, the LG phone is slightly curved along the length of the phone rather than its width, as is the case with Samsung's curved phone.  Also, as reported by the Chosun Ilbo, the new LG phone includes not only a flexible display, but also a flexible battery which represents a significant technological advance.
Coincidentally, today's English edition of the Chosun Ilbo also contained a story about the announcement on Monday by Google-owned Motorola of Project Ara.   The official Motorola Blog describes the project as follows: "Led by Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara is developing a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it."  To achieve these goals, Project Ara has teamed up with Phonebloks, an effort described in the following video.

The brain to computer interface: the future of user interfaces?

Digital communications technology is developing at a breathtaking pace, and one area in which we're likely to see big changes is in the user interface with computers.   Most of us are still accustomed to keyboards, but smartphones and tablets have already begun to change that with touch screens, voice recognition and smart stylus input.   However, as reported by the Samsung Economic Research Institute, advances in brain to computer interface (BCI) technology may soon change all of that.  BCI is gaining momentum as a next-generation technology for everyday needs.
As shown in the accompanying diagram, in a BCI system, a brainwave is read and converted into a digital signal that is processed and converted into some sort of physical action or application.  The variety of actions/applications that might be developed in the future seems to be limited only by one's imagination.