I'm a former "salaryman" (Osaka), former Apple employee (Cupertino), jazz musician, branding enthusiast, communications specialist, and design evangelist currently working in Japan as a fulltime marketing professor for a local private university. I'm also director of a Japanese design group and love living here in Japan.

Please find more information on my background at my website here.
Interests

OK, here's a list of my interests (in no particular order): Beautiful design, philosophy, branding, business communications, marketing, great presentations (and doing my part to help rid the world of boring, ineffective, ridiculously bad, amateurish PowerPoint presentations") Zen in the arts, Zen in daily life, Buddhism, Jazz, Blues, playing the drums, Japanese pop music (save SMAP and Ayumi Hamasaki, of course), Japanese traditional music, Okinawa music, fitness (particularly weight training & nutrition), hiking, cross-country skiing, searching out "Wabi-Sabi" in the Japanese countryside, reading (mostly non-fiction these days), Mahatma Gandhi, Ayn Rand, Plato, Taoism, Martin Luther King Jr., multimedia, technology, Apple Macintosh, Apple iPods, all things Apple, graphic design, web design, American college football (especially Oregon State Univ.), Hawaii, Oregon, Switzerland, Asia, Japanese labor management, Japanese popular culture, WWII history, laughing, good TV/film animation, leadership, education, the Ocean and incredible sunsets, helping young people (and not so young people) improve themselves, interior design, Earth Wind & Fire, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, good films, digital photography, snow, sun, spicy food, Japanese food, late-night TV, early morning coffee, reading or working in a downtown cafe, meeting friends for drinks, learning something new everyday...

Presentation Zen

Surefire strategies to help you win the hearts and minds of every crowd for every purpose Presentations that Change Minds illustrates fourteen proven strategies for creating and delivering winning presentations. Just as importantly, it shows you how to determine which strategy will work best in a given situation and how to apply a range of best practices for realizing that strategy. Presentations guru Josh Gordon supplies sample timelines for delivering presentations based on the various strategies. He also gives expert advice and guidance on how to read an audience and alter its collective mindset; how to avoid dangerous assumptions that can sink a presentation; how to prepare physically and mentally; and much more.

Presentations that Change Minds, by Josh Gordon

Top British transplant surgeons have accused China of harvesting the organs of thousands of executed prisoners every year to sell for transplants.

"The weight of evidence has accumulated to a point over the last few months where it's really incontrovertible in our opinion."

China 'selling prisoners' organs'

Economists who insist that "offshore outsourcing" is just a routine extension of international trade are overlooking how major a transformation it will likely bring -- and how significant the consequences could be. The governments and societies of the developed world must start preparing, and fast.

Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution? - Alan S. Blinder

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment.

In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained—or lost—by the decisions we make today.

"In this book, Benkler establishes himself as the leading intellectual of the information age. Profoundly rich in its insight and truth, this work will be the central text for understanding how networks have changed how we understand the world. No work to date has more carefully or convincingly made the case for a fundamental change in how we understand the economy of society."
- Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School

The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

George Packer on Iraq

Tal Afar is an ancient city of a quarter-million inhabitants, situated on a smuggling route in the northwestern desert of Iraq, near the Syrian border. In January, when I visited, the streets had been muddied by cold winter rains and gouged by the tracks of armored vehicles. Tal Afar’s stone fortifications and narrow alleys had the haggard look of a French town in the First World War that had changed hands several times. In some neighborhoods, markets were open and children played in the streets; elsewhere, in areas cordoned off by Iraqi checkpoints, shops remained shuttered, and townspeople peered warily from front doors and gates.

Since the Iraq war began, American forces had repeatedly driven insurgents out of Tal Afar, but the Army did not have enough troops to maintain a sufficient military presence there, and insurgents kept returning to terrorize the city.

The soldiers who worked to secure Tal Afar were, in a sense, rebels against an incoherent strategy that has brought the American project in Iraq to the brink of defeat.

...

He walked me outside into the sunlit garden. On the street, a car passed by slowly. For an hour, I had forgotten to be afraid, and now that we were saying goodbye I was reluctant to go. In the past we had always shaken hands, but on this occasion Dr. Butti kissed my cheeks, in the Iraqi way. Perhaps he felt, as I did, that we might not meet again for a long time.

THE LESSON OF TAL AFAR, by George Packer | The New Yorker | Fact

ClickRepair finds and repairs clicks and crackle in audio files obtained by capturing vinyl and shellac (78) records to digital CD format. It is not a filter; it searches the file sample-by-sample, and only changes those identified as being suspect. It is possible to operate automatically, or to intervene manually as required. Favorite detection and repair settings may be named and saved.

ClickRepair

I saw a video the other day that really stood out from the rest of the links making the rounds.

It depicts a man demonstrating software that appears to parse what he's saying fast enough to reassemble the same words by pulling and reordering bits from a recorded Michael Jackson interview. The result: Jackson appears to speak the same sentence right back to him.

The man goes on to explain how the software behind this process works, and his video closes with a live performance of the software in which a performer appears to employ the beat-box method to control the playback of audio and video on a large video screen behind him, in front of what I can only imagine must be a dazzled crowd.

If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch the video here.

The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz

In this fourth and final excerpt from "Patriots Act: Voices of Dissent and the Risk of Speaking Out," Daniel Ellsberg talks about why he should have released the Pentagon Papers sooner, the dangers in following one's conscience, and his fear that the White House will use a terror attack as a "Reichstag fire to close down democracy."

Daniel Ellsberg: Still blowing the whistle

The cadence you get to experience when the XK's engine is pushed toward the 6,000 rpm point is what Jaguar touts as a centerpiece technology feature. The engine's sound is derived from a combination of valve regulation in the dual exhaust pipes, an intake system replete with a mechanical speaker that transmits sound to the interior and the gear box system, which is tuned to offer a low-frequency pitch to the cabin area.

The end result is a carefully calibrated roar with a pronounced British flavor.

When an Algorithm Takes the Wheel