Okinawa International Film Festival

 The 1st day of the festival saw 550 artists and directors walk on the red carpet, and 53,000 spectators. This red carpet is the world’s longest. The event lasts for 8 days and has 57 sponsors. During these eight days, 74 works from 9 countries were shown, with 20 works competing for awards. The event was seen by a record-setting 420,000 people!   Mr. Osaki, President of Yoshimoto Kogyo and chairman of the executive committee, said...

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Digital Picture Book Award

  An awards ceremony for digital picture books was held.   This award goes to a digital picture book that is displayed to children on smartphones, tablets, or digital signage rather than on television or a personal computer.  The sponsors of the event are NPO “CANVAS” and Digital Picture Book, Inc.  The center of attention this year was “My Glasses Yearn to be Butterflies” by middle school student Yusuke Uno. In this story, his eyeglasses become entranced by a beautiful butterfly and through a variety of means attempt...

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4Development of the Automatically-Interpreting Phone

  NTT has released an appli that automatically translates conversations in 10 different languages, including English, Chinese, Korean, and French. They say that it can be used at meetings and during phone calls.  Accuracy is said to be at 90% for Japanese and 80% for English. By using a database in the cloud, it will likely improve rapidly. After some time of being able to translate on the web using Google Translate, the ability to use such a feature in conversation is finally here. I’m impressed. I was actually the 1st person to...

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Digital Textbooks: 1 person; 1 year; 10,000 yen

 In 2010, when the DiTT (Association of Digital Textbooks & Teaching) was established, there were those who said that our goal of having digital textbooks and a device in the hand of every student was just a castle in the air. Some recommended that we amend our goal to use regular textbooks rather than digital. In the last year, things have changed.  Osaka City, the Arakawa section of Tokyo, Takeoshi city in Saga prefecture, and Bizenshi city in Okayama Prefecture have all pledged to put a digital device into the hand of every elementary...

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