Korean Bipedal Robot Kit

Grok Headline matches for Korean Bipedal Robot Kit

"Nanowalker" the Bipedal DNA Robot

"Nanowalker" the Bipedal DNA Robot 05/06/2004 08:56 AM
New Scientist has an article about a DNA bipedal robot that has been created and is taking its first steps. This microscopic robot called "NanoWalker" is just 10 nanometers long and it's made from DNA fragments! Researchers at New York State University say their robot is the first nanoscale bipedal robot to succeed. The robot walks along a kind of DNA track and is able to detach its legs and reattach them further down. The robot is so tiny the researchers couldn't even see the robot actually walk, they had to do experiments to see if the DNA fingerprint they expected from the walk had been created. The researchers hope for their next feat to make the walker carry a load!

New Korean Robot Wants to Guard Your
Home

New Korean Robot Wants to Guard Your
Home 03/08/2004 11:03 PM
BoingBoing pal du Paris Roland Piquepaille says:

There's a new robot in town who wants to guard your home. This new security robot, which currently has no name, is designed by the Korean company Mostitech and will be distributed starting in June by Korea's top mobile carrier, SK Telecom. With its price tag of only $850, it will be a serious competitor for Banryu, which costs $18,000. The unnamed robot is 50 centimeters tall and weighs only 12 kilograms. In case of emergency, such as a fire, its cameras can take snapshots and send them to the owner's cell phone. Likewise, if an unexpected visitor is entering your home, you'll receive his picture on your phone. It also can entertain your kids by reading them a book. The Korea Times tells us the story while this overview provides some pictures of the cute unnamed robot.

Link

Bipedal Dog

Bipedal Dog 07/22/2004 03:00 PM
She's no Natash a the Walking Monkey, but Faith the Amazing Biped Dog certainly has an impressive gait. Faith was born with just one front leg and it was on backwards. A vet graciously removed the dying limb and, with help from her family, Faith has overcome her handicap: "Even though Faith has this defect we taught her to stand, hop, and eventually walk on her two back legs, like a human." Link

Bipedal monkey

Bipedal monkey 07/21/2004 06:19 PM
It's a weird day for non-human primates. Natasha, a black macaque at the Safari Park zoo in Israel, became exclusively bipedal after surviving a near-deadly stomach disease. Natasha's veterinarian says that brain damage may be to blame (thank?) for her new ability. Pierre Boulle, your meme is ready. Link

Macaque Monkey Goes Totally Bipedal

Macaque Monkey Goes Totally Bipedal 07/22/2004 09:48 PM

"octopi engaged in bipedal locomotion
across the sea floor"

"octopi engaged in bipedal locomotion
across the sea floor" 03/26/2005 01:35 PM

An Appeal by 365 Korean Organizations to
the Iraqi Group Holding a Korean
National

An Appeal by 365 Korean Organizations to
the Iraqi Group Holding a Korean
National 06/21/2004 04:29 AM

Following open letter is from an OhmyNews article that encouraged wide distribution.  I don't agree with the content but I think the letter reflects the view of a small yet growing and increasingly vocal part of Korean population so here it is:

An Appeal by 365 Korean Organizations to the Iraqi Group Holding a Korean National

We appeal for the release of the Korean national Kim Seon Il.

Today the Korean people were overcome with shock at the news the Korean Kim Seon Il has been kidnapped in Iraq. His seizure and the threat against the life of this private citizen is already a source of unspeakable sadness for his family and the Korean people. This sadness and shock is the same for the many Koreans who have opposed the United States' unjust invasion and the deployment of Korean troops to Iraq.

The Korean people are well aware of the fact that the US invaded Iraq for domination and oil, and not for the freedom and peace of the Iraqi people. We know also that the US occupation of Iraq has denied the Iraqi people their sovereignty and that there have been widespread human rights abuses by US forces there, leading to Iraqi pain and loss of life. For this reason we have done all that is humanly possible to prevent the deployment of Korean troops, as they will in no way contribute to the peace and security of the Iraqi people.

The kidnapping and threatening a private citizen with death, however, will not contribute to Iraqi peace. The Iraqi people are right to resist the US's unjust invasion, occupation, and carnage. Nevertheless, kidnapping and threatening a private citizen with death cannot be justified. Doing so will only lead to a vicious cycle of blood and revenge.

Again we make an earnest appeal. Please make your claims known through dialogue and release Kim Seon Il to his family as he is of no relation to government policy.

21 June 2004

Seoul, Korea

Korean Network Against Dispatching Troops To Iraq

A Running Robot Or A Rolling Robot?

A Running Robot Or A Rolling Robot? 12/18/2003 12:58 PM
It took years for researchers to figure out how to make a robot be able to stand and walk on two legs. In fact, it's so complicated, that some researchers are giving up on that idea and using Segway balancing technology on their robots instead of legs. However, the folks at Sony seem to have taken the concept of the upright walking robot one step further: they've figured out how to make a robot run. That's right, it actually leaves the ground at points while jogging along. It apparently needs a bit of a walking start to get up to speed, and even at running speed, it's more of a slow jog - where it's feet barely leave the ground. Still, it's a start, and with some more work, they believe they can really make the robot run.

Korean Archery

Korean Archery 08/22/2004 09:18 PM

South Korea's continuing dominance in archery is amazing but, like the effect of monopoly on economy, I think overdominance is starting to hurt international archery competitions.

IMHO, countries overdominating a field of sports should share it's knowhows and training programs with rest of the world, particularly with those countries that never had a chance to win an olympic medal.  For example, South Korean archery association should offer archery scholarships for amateur archers from third-world countries.  I am sure Korean companies like Samsung and LG will be glad to sponsor such scholarship programs.

Imagine the joy everyone will feel when those athletes win their countries' first olympic medal.  I also think such programs are far more rewarding than traditional international aids and foreign relation efforts.

Tigers in the Korean DMZ?

Tigers in the Korean DMZ? 09/11/2004 12:49 PM
Xeni Jardin: Snipped from Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design email newsletter, a New York Times story about wild animals reclaiming the heavily-landmined DMZ that divides North and South Korea.

[E]nvironmentalists have recognized this area one of the most enduring symbols of the cold war and one of the most fortified and heavily mined stretches on earth as the Korean peninsula's, and possibly East Asia's, most important wildlife refuge. They have been pressing to preserve it but are feeling a special urgency now because of the growing reconciliation between the North and the South. The environmentalists fear that a South Korea that puts economic development first and a North Korea that has no environmental movement could together lead to the zone's rapid destruction as a refuge. (..)

"The DMZ is the last major vestige of Korea's natural heritage," said Kim Ke Chung, a professor at the Center for BioDiversity Research at Penn State and chairman of the DMZ Forum, an organization based in the United States that is dedicated to preserving the zone. "It's probably the only good thing to come out of the Korean War and cold war. So we have to preserve this as a nature reserve." [Bruce Sterling says: "How did the Cold War become the 'cold war' all of a sudden?]

The DMZ Forum recently held a conference in Seoul to gather support for designating the zone a Unesco World Heritage Site, a classification that would curb all development. William B. Shore, secretary of the forum and a former fellow at the Regional Plan Association of New York, said the zone should become a center for eco-tourism as an alternative to turning it into a weekend getaway for residents of Seoul.

"People are now willing to pay large sums to see wild animals in the proper setting," Mr. Shore said. "Eco-tourism would protect the DMZ from becoming the Hamptons of South Korea." [Bruce Sterling says: "Perhaps it's possible to transform the Hamptons into a DMZ."]

reg-free Link

Korean Slavery

Korean Slavery 05/04/2004 04:47 PM
Korean Slavery - Mark A. Peterson [pdf]

Korean Bloggers

Korean Bloggers 06/05/2005 11:34 PM
Thanks to Jin Ho, Heewon, Goo Dong-Eon, Xenix, Qho, Young Wook, and BK for a very interesting dinner discussion and explaining the Korean blogging scene to me.

Korea is reported by the OECD to have the highest high-speed Internet penetration of any nation. Korea has an extremely vibrant gaming, blogging, mobile phone and youth culture scene and I was eager to find out more about what was going on. I scribbled a bunch of notes over coffee during the day and over dinner. Please excuse any errors since I have not been able to fact check everything. If you could point them out and let me update them, I would appreciate it.

According to articles in the press, there are 5-6 million blogs. These are not to be confused with hompy. Hompy (a derivative of home page) are personal home pages with photo albums, guest books, avatars, background skins, and background music. There are approximately 10 million hompy pages. In a city with a population of 10 million and a country with a population of 45 million, that's quite impressive. Companies seem to be making money selling background music and items for hompy pages. Most of the posts are focused on photos and one line comments on pages of friends. They are generally closed communities and are focused more on real-time presence-like communication rather than diary or dialog.

Cyworld, which sounded like the leader for hompys has a feature they call "scratch scrap". This allows you to copy/paste content from other web pages easily to your hompy. On of the problems that I see with this is that this simple built-in feature does not provide a link back to the original source. It is rumored engineers who designed this left and joined Naver, one of the leading blog companies and created a similar feature for them. Generally speaking, it sounded like people don't link very much. They are still mostly plain html and not css + xhtml. There seemed to be some trackback implementation, but it is not yet as widely used as in the US or Japan. As far as I could tell, none of the blog systems used any of the standard APIs, and some had RSS feeds. Blogs and hompys don't seem to be pinging any pinger sites, which makes them nearly invisible to the outside world. In addition, many sites block search engine bots from crawling hompys and blogs.

It appears that one of the biggest problems is that there are several 800 pound gorilla type portals that remind me of AOL during it's powerful years. They try to create walled gardens of users. With millions of bloggers and hompy users in each community, they are focused more on integrating inside of their portals than open standards or linking across portals. There are some independent blog services and aggregators, but they still seem to be focused on community and somewhat inward facing networks. A not-so-visibile majority of blogs in Japan and the US are also this way, but the public facing citizen journalist or pundit-style blogs seem to be very sparse in Korea.

One of the reasons might be due to the success of OhmyNews. I visited OhmyNews as well, and they are truly an online newspaper powerhouse. You can read about them in detail in Dan Gillmor's We the Media, but they are a edited news website with droves of citizen journalists who submit articles. They have courses in writing for the citizen journalists, tip jars that people can pay them through, editors to help with the important stories, lots of influence and visibility and offline community activities. I can imagine that someone who had something political or pundit-like to say might easily choose to write for OhmyNews than to start a blog. This doesn't describe everything, but I'm sure that OhmyNews has attracted a fair number of the potential media blogger types.

I still have a lot to learn but the incredible difference in the blogging scene and the apparent happiness with what the people had considering the widespread adoption made me wonder if the Korean blogs would ever look like American or Japanese blogs. (Many aspects of the Japanese blogging scene seem to be following in the footsteps of the US blogging scene, albeit with some differences.)

Update:

4- jaz @ June 2, 2005 10:43 AM

hey joi. the function is called "scrap," not "scratch"
what it allows you to do is to display a particular post from someone's mini-hompy (cyworld) - if the permission setting of that post is set to "allow scrap" - not from just any website. there's a watermark-like feature that goes with it, which displays the original author's name and the link back to the origianl mini-hompy.

Sorry about the error. I was told however, that most bloggers and hompyiers didn't cite or link. Someone said that the big portals encouraged because it allowed all of the content to be searched inside the portal, rather than offsite. Does anyone have any more information on this?

Comment - TrackBack

North Korean nukes

North Korean nukes 04/13/2004 02:02 PM
North Korean Nuclear Devices. "Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology around the world, has told his interrogators that during a trip to North Korea five years ago he was taken to a secret underground nuclear plant and shown what he described as three nuclear devices."

Motorola's Korean Image

Motorola's Korean Image 12/10/2003 06:58 AM
Digital Chosunilbo Dec 10 2003 6:25AM ET

Hacker cracks 6 Korean s

Hacker cracks 6 Korean s 06/21/2004 07:05 PM
Techzonez Jun 21 2004 11:23PM GMT

Korean USB Memory Startup

Korean USB Memory Startup 09/24/2004 07:22 AM

A Korean startup with a line of patented USB memory stick products is looking for US partners.  Their product is selling well in Korea but they don't know where the cluetrain stops are in the US so they need help.

I get a lot of requests like this but this is the first time I posted about it.  Why?  Because it's one of those father's friend's son type of thing.  Not as thick as blood but near enough to motivate me to move a few more extra muscles than usual.

Microsoft Gives S. Korean Education
$8.7M

Microsoft Gives S. Korean Education
$8.7M 07/06/2004 11:27 AM
AP via ABCNEWS.com Jul 6 2004 3:39PM GMT

Gov't considering redenomination of
Korean won

Gov't considering redenomination of
Korean won 09/16/2004 11:32 AM
Maekyung Internet Sep 16 2004 3:15PM GMT

eBay ups Korean stake

eBay ups Korean stake 09/01/2004 04:36 AM
In brief Mopping up the minorities

Korean Google Blog

Korean Google Blog 10/03/2002 01:42 PM
Seok Wan Yang is tracking Google in Korean. I don't speak Korean, but it looks helpful....

Symmetricom Supports Korean 3G

Symmetricom Supports Korean 3G 08/17/2004 11:06 AM
Unstrung.com Aug 17 2004 3:48PM GMT

Korean General Elections

Korean General Elections 04/15/2004 09:09 PM

As expected, pro-government Uri Party got 152 seats out of 299, which gives them the majority.  Han-nara (Grand National) Party lost its majority position but still managed to eek out a respectable showing, thanks to the daughter of a former dictator who took control of the party just weeks before the election.  It's funny how conservatives prefer the nostalgic certainty of iron-clad rule by dictators over euphoric optimism of liberals.  Min-noh (Democratic Labor) Party emerged in the third place, making the ultra-liberal pro-labor party a political force to be reckoned with.

National Assembly seats after ballot counting[As of 1:00 a.m.]

Party	Before	Now
Uri Party	49	152
Grand National Party	137	121
Millennium Democratic Party	61	9
Democratic Labor Party	0	10
United Liberal Democrats	10	4
Others	14	3

"South Korean Beheaded"

"South Korean Beheaded" 06/24/2004 11:11 AM

Korean Wave (aka Hanlyu)

Korean Wave (aka Hanlyu) 04/17/2005 10:47 AM

Korea has started to emerge as a c ultural powerhouse in asia, in a trend called Ha nlyu ( Korean Wave) which threatens to overshadow even Hollywood and American pop culture.  Korean movies, music, and games are increasingly taking the top spots in popularity charts in china, japan, and south eastern asia countries and it's TV programs are starting to sweep TV primetime slots in those countries.  For example, Jewel in the Palace (google), a Korean drama about an apprentice in the royal kitchen who became the nation's first female royal physician, was watched by more than 40% of the TV audiences in Hong Kong last month.

As a Korean-American, all this is amazing because I still find most Korean movies and dramas not very interesting.  My guess is that Korean cultural goods are popular because they:

• are more familiar to eastern countries than western culture.
• are not burdened by animosity against Japan
• are of relatively high quality
• offer more bang for the buck

While greedy copycat producers are still busy churning out trash in Korea, overall quality seems to be improving at a fast pace still so I think the trend will continue for a while.

Korean Robots to Help War in Iraq

Korean Robots to Help War in Iraq 05/11/2004 05:14 AM
Hankooki May 11 2004 9:22AM GMT

Traditional Korean Music

Traditional Korean Music 04/07/2005 03:24 AM

I enjoy all kinds of music but I particularly enjoy traditional korean music.  If you are interested in listening to some, the best album to get started with is the OST album for the Korean movie Sopyonje.  It starts with a bamboo flute instrumental titled Thousand Year-Old Crane.  The instrument is called daekoom, my favorite instrument, which sounds similar to shakuhachi although I think it's deeper and coarser in a satisfying way that sooths the aching inside walls of your heart.  Then it moves on to several pansori songs which to me sounds like a fusion of rap and opera.  I just love pansori!  The only problem is that the CD might be difficult to find outside Korea.

Doubts over N Korean bombs

Doubts over N Korean bombs 01/22/2004 03:10 AM
A top US scientist who visited North Korea says he left "unconvinced" it could develop a nuclear bomb.

SK Telecom: Korean for Wireless

SK Telecom: Korean for Wireless 06/15/2004 10:00 AM
Business Week Jun 15 2004 2:25PM GMT

The North Korean Uranium Challenge

The North Korean Uranium Challenge 05/23/2004 09:01 PM
North Korea may be engaging in exactly the kind of nuclear proliferation that President Bush says he went to war in Iraq to halt.

Bush condemns beheading of S. Korean

Bush condemns beheading of S. Korean 06/22/2004 03:31 PM

EBay to Buy Rest of Korean Auctioneer

EBay to Buy Rest of Korean Auctioneer 11/17/2003 05:44 AM
Boston Globe Nov 17 2003 5:33AM ET

S. Korean Captive in Iraq said to be
alive

S. Korean Captive in Iraq said to be
alive 06/22/2004 10:29 AM

U.S. Delegation Visits N. Korean Nukes
(AP)

U.S. Delegation Visits N. Korean Nukes
(AP) 01/10/2004 12:29 AM
AP - An unofficial delegation of Americans who visited North Korea said Saturday they saw the country's disputed Yongbyong nuclear facility but said they couldn't give details until information about their trip was reported to Washington.

N Korean defectors flown to Seoul

N Korean defectors flown to Seoul 07/26/2004 09:27 PM
More than 200 North Korean refugees arrive in the South from an unnamed third country.

IBM, LG Elec to split Korean PC venture

IBM, LG Elec to split Korean PC venture 09/14/2004 05:29 AM
Hindustan Times Sep 14 2004 9:44AM GMT

200 N. Korean defectors arrive in Seoul

200 N. Korean defectors arrive in Seoul 07/27/2004 07:45 PM
Maekyung Internet Jul 27 2004 11:18PM GMT

New N. Korean Missiles Said to Threaten
U.S. (Reuters)

New N. Korean Missiles Said to Threaten
U.S. (Reuters) 08/03/2004 10:58 AM
Reuters - North Korea is deploying new land- and sea-based ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads and may have sufficient range to hit the United States, according to the authoritative Jane's Defense Weekly.

South Korean firm to buy Lycos

South Korean firm to buy Lycos 08/02/2004 05:03 AM
ZDNet UK Aug 2 2004 9:43AM GMT

US team visits key N Korean site

US team visits key N Korean site 01/10/2004 12:26 AM
An unofficial US delegation visits the nuclear complex at Yongbyon, the first outsiders to do so in over a year.
Grok Description matches for Korean Bipedal Robot Kit
GrokA matches for Korean Bipedal Robot Kit

Korean Bipedal Robot Kit

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