Palau - Jellyfish Lake

Palau - Curious Black Mantas in the German Channel

Tokyo Japan earthquake March 11, 2011

Gamma Radiation during Flight between Schiphol Amsterdam - Tokyo Narita

Radiation level at sea level in Tokyo is currently 0.09 uSv/h which is similar to the pre-March 11 level. At higher altitudes, however, radiation levels are much larger due to cosmic radiation. To see the impact of altitude on radiation levels, we measured the in-flight gamma radiation dose rates aboard a KLM plane flying from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to Tokyo Narita Airport.

Measurement Conditions

• Date: July 27, 2011
• Flight: KL861, AMS-NRT
• Seat: 12A
  
• Flight Duration: 11h00m
• Maximum Altitude: 33,000ft
• Route: Netherlands, Sweden, South of Nova Zembla, Jakutsk, Chabarovsk, Niigata, Narita
• Measurement Device: Polimaster PM1610
• Type of Radiation Measured: gamma
• Measurement Interval: 10m
  

Measurements
The graph below shows the dose rates measured. The vertical axis shows dose rate (uSv/h) and the horizontal axis time (hh:mm).

The total dose during the flight was 25 uSv. The flight started at 0:50 and ended at 12:10. Soon after taking off, radiation levels started to rise to 2 uSv/h. Three distinct radiation levels were recorded, each indicating a different altitude during the flight. A peak value of 3.1 uSv/h was reached close to Nova Zembla which was the most northern position during the flight. When the plane navigated southwards, we saw radiation levels gradually decreasing. Because incoming cosmic radiation particles are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, the intensity of in-flight radiation is a function of altitude. In general, radiation shielding by the geomagnetic field is greatest at the equator and decreases as one goes north or south.

The top dose rate measured during the flight was about 30 times higher than the current levels in Tokyo. Does this mean that flying is dangerous? No, the accumulated radiation dose per year for five round trip flights between Europe and Japan add sea-level exposure would be approximately 1 mSv. This is well below any internationally alarm threshold levels.

Volunteering in Ishinomaki, Miyagi-ken

Ishinomaki, 50 km north-east of Sendai, is the worst hit city by the tsunami in terms of casualties and destroyed houses. On a population of 160,000 almost 6,000 people are reported dead or missing, and 28,000 houses are fully or partly destroyed.

End of June 2011, I volunteered a week in Ishinomaki helping with cleaning and other relief work. The volunteering organizations, like the Peace Boat NPO, have setup an excellent and impressive infrastructure. Many volunteers I met have quit their jobs and moved to the tsunami hit regions for help. The volunteering center HQ runs from the Ishinomaki Senshu University Campus that also provides free camping facilities and basic sanitary facilities. Once you register as a volunteer, you are enrolled into an insurance scheme.

The volunteering HQ gathers needs from local residents. Volunteers are grouped and dispatched to locations. The first day, I worked in a group to remove sludge from gardens, houses and shops. In the late afternoon, we were asked to help searching for a 400kg safes. After some digging, we fortunately found it and could pull it on a mini-van. The 80 year old owner was very happy and offered us presents which we kindly refused.

After one day, I decided to join another relief work group called 'Amore Ishinomaki'. This group is lead by Yutaro - a Japanese body painter who went in March 2011 to the Sendai region by bicycle from Tokyo to start rescue work. His group works in a different way than the larger NPOs. In several districts in Ishinomaki City, one assigned local resident is responsible for prioritizing the works. Every morning, the group of volunteers goes to the house of this resident to get instructions and pick up tools. Our local 'mama-san' even prepared a delicious lunch for our group.

The district where I worked is located about 1km from the sea side. Most of the houses are two stories of which the ground floor was completely destroyed. Residents often live on the second floor but are unable to do the cleaning by themselves.

In our team we had three professional carpenters who removed the damaged walls, floors and kitchens. Water levels had been up to the ceiling of the first floor of the house. After opening the floors and walls, we could take the mud from the basement. A tough job to remove the 20cm thick slime layer.











The Jieitai, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, have setup public baths for local residents and volunteers. After a day of hard work, one can refresh in these free bathing facilities. Usually the water comes from a nearby river which is filtered and sanitized. We were lucky that onsen water from Yamagata Prefecture arrived that day.

More than three months after 311, the needs are still high while the number of volunteers has dramatically dropped. The volunteer center in Ishinomaki has announced on their web site that individual volunteers from outside the region cannot register anymore. Smaller organizations like Amore Ishinomaki will continue their relief work, though.

For those we want to volunteer, please check the volunteering organization's web site for the latest updates. Here is a map of Ishinomaki with the main spots described in this post.

Stay tuned.

Off-portal mobile sites in Japan see excessive growth

Japanese mobile content sites inside the walled garden of the official carrier portals have a tough time. Competition is severe and lots of free content is available on the mobile Internet not regulated by the carriers. The introduction of search engines has made it easier to find your favorite content. Over the past four years, many content providers and publishing companies have moved (part of) their content to the free public Internet.

Mobage Town is a good example of such an off-portal service offering games, social networking services and news. In April, Mobage Town had 10 million registered users and a total number of 15.6 billion page views were generated. It took only 2 years to reach these numbers.

We thought that setting up off-portal sites and making money was pretty difficult for non-Japanese companies wishing to enter this dynamic mobile market. In March we met Goal.com, a Swiss company providing soccer content on the web and mobile. In terms of page views and unique visitors, Goal.com is the world’s largest new media soccer news provider. It publishes 17 editions in 14 different languages – even a full Japanese version is available written by Japanese editors based in Europe. Joan Blaas, Vice President Mobile of Goal.com came to Japan for business development: ‘We launched our Japanese mobile site in November 2007, as of today we have more than 1 million page views a month,’ said Joan. We were not so impressed by this number. ‘Since the launch, we have not done any promotion for the site in Japan. My technical team in Europe has not even optimized the content for Japanese handsets,’ continued Joan.

Out of curiosity we took our phone and entered the URL m.goal.com in our browser. The site looked bad – images were very small and it took a long time to load. One million page views on such a site without marketing suddenly looked very good.

We advised Joan to get in touch with UBIT, a local mobile technology company that could help Goal.com with optimizing and testing the site on Japanese phones. The next step was to introduce Goal.com to Mobage Town. Within two weeks, Goal.com and UBIT adapted the site and the number of page views subsequently doubled in a month. Goal.com has plans to grow aggressively. ‘We went live with our content in Mobage Town, and expect to reach 4 million page views during EURO 2008, and aim to become the largest soccer site in 2009. With this traffic and focus on soccer, we are an interesting medium to advertise,’ said Joan. We agreed. Goal.com enjoys riding the off-portal wave.

Mobile Content Search – Can Niche Players Play A Role ?

Paid mobile search, advertising in which advertisers only pay when a visitor clicks on their ad or link from a search engine page, is rapidly gaining momentum. A small US startup company called MCN, headquartered in the west of Tokyo, between Shibuya and Ebisu along the Yamanote circular line, is one of the drivers behind paid mobile search. MCN started in 2004 in Mountain View, CA.

Last year, the business headquarters was relocated to Tokyo to be closer to the fast growing Asian markets. The research and product development team is still in Mountain View. The company already employs 50 people.

The challenge for mobile search is the quality of the search results. It often takes more than five clicks to reach the relevant content. Mobile users do not have the patience for this. Long click distances kill content discovery. MCN is changing this with allwords - its vertical paid search program. If the provider’s database contains content relevant to the query, it can be presented to the mobile users in a few clicks. 'We call this 'Search Merchandising' and we are driving the industry’s highest clickthrough and conversion rates for mobile content transactions. On music search, for example, our clickthroughs are approaching 50% and growing and our content
partners tell us our conversion rates are easily double those of competing systems' says Marc Brookman, CEO of MCN. Content providers are charged on a pay-per-click basis, similar to
Google’s Adwords, except that with allwords they don’t have to manage the complexity of bidding for keywords—they can buy all of the keywords in a given category (Music, Images, Games, Comics, Video, etc)..

In Japan, MCN has signed up with more than 30 content providers and 6 distribution partners and portals. Yahoo! Mobile Japan uses allwords. On the Yahoo! Mobile Japan top page, users can
click on vertical content channel links to browse to the music or comics or games pages where the content search is powered by MCN. After entering the key word, MCN connects the query in
real-time directly to multiple content provider databases, ranks the most relevant results into a ‘Top 5’ and returns actual content items, not just links, to the user to purchase the content.

MCN co-exists with the traditional search providers. Google and Yahoo are targeting big traffic customers with mobile search. Google provides its search engine to DoCoMo and KDDI. Their
search results are often not relevant for paid mobile content discovery, the niche market MCN has been growing in with its white label service. How long will it take before Google and
Yahoo adapt their search and business model for the mobile Internet?

Stay tuned.

Yasukuni Shrine

Welcome!

The first blog is about the Yasukuni Shrine that commemorates the Japanese war-dead, not only war criminals. Japanese PM Koizumi visits the shrine yearly. This often invokes lots of noise from China and Korea which blame Japan not to take its war history serious. It recently escalated to aggressive protests in both China and Korea against Japan.

How to solve the Yasukuni Shrine problem? Japan could set up a separate place for those war criminal and expell their souls from the Yasukuni Shrine. The problem is a war-time Japanese PM who did not actively defend himself during the war tribunal and was sentenced to death. According to many Japanese he did nothing wrong and is not a war crimial. He had the pride to take all responsibility for the Emperor's and military wrong doings. Japan could set up a separate place for him as well.

Will this solve the problem? I am afraid not. China will continue blaming Japan because both countries are aiming for regional leadership. Japan had the economic leadership and China the political. Japan and China are now interested to become political and economic leaders, respectively, as well.

Both countries have a hunger for natural resources. It is very likely that they will continue to struggle for some time. As the Pacific War broke out because of Japan's growing needs for resources, I hope this time the matter will be solved by co-operation rather than ongoing unease -- stay tuned.