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Things Japanese: A collection of short stories (Volume 1)(Paperback)

A collection of short stories that celebrates contemporary writing on things Japanese. These stories will warm your heart, leave you feeling fuzzy and warm, and crave things Japanese. The stories are rooted in direct experience of things Japanese that explore relationships, perceptions, attitudes, culture, identity, and desire. Theses stories confirm that Japan continues to fascinate and touch people on many levels.

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Stefan Chiarantano (Author, Creator, Editor, Introduction, Contributor), T. Graham Westerlund (Creator), Margaret Grant (Contributor), Setsu Nagatoshi (Contributor), Mindy Mejia (Contributor), Colin O'Sullivan (Contributor), Sonia Saikaley (Contributor), Emily Juniper Ward (Contributor), Jodie Schewitz (Designer)

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Home » Events, Technology, Videos from Japan

The Phenomenon of Paro

Submitted By: goZA 3 October 2009 857 views One Comment

JapanFest 2009 in Atlanta, featured some of the latest in Japanese technology! Well, it was a therapeutic robot baby seal named “Paro”, but don’t let your love of cute blind you to this high-tech cuddly beast!

Paro was developed in order to interact with human beings and to make them feel emotional attachment to it. Hence it super-cute and wants to take over the world! It has a diurnal rhythm of morning, daytime, and night, which means it is active during the daytime, but gets sleepy at night. Whew..so it has one weakness. And who doesn’t liked a tired sleepy baby? Super-cute, again! Oh wait it cries, too.

It has five kinds of sensors: tactile, light, audition, temperature, and posture sensors, with which it can perceive people and its environment. So keep your house and nose clean, or you might have a super-cute robot to deal with. Paro can learn to behave in a way that the user prefers, so you can teach him total world domination and other tricks, like rolling over and fetch. Maybe? And he also responds to his new name, in-case Paro is not super-cute enough for you.

It’s an autonomous robot, so he can express its feelings, such as surprise and happiness, while voluntarily blinking its eyes and moving its head and legs and crying in warning before trying to kill everything in sight with super-cuteness. Paro feels happy when you stroke it and hold it softly. It also feels angry when you hit it, so don’t give it any reason to start on that world domination kick–shame on you! Don’t you know that super-cute robots want to rule the world enough already that we don’t have to give them any more reasons? Don’t you know that?

No?

OK, well marvel at this phenomenon that is Paro while you still have time. Super-cuteness will rule the world and super-cute robots will be the rulers of the future.

For more information:
Paro’s site