世論 What Japan Thinks

As the rainy season finally finishes and the real summer season starts, the probability of lightning strikes increases. With this in mind, japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by goo Research into computers and lightning. Between the 21st and 23th of July they got 1,084 successfully completed responses to their internet-based questionnaire. In the sample 53.5% were female, 22.7% in their twenties, 39.7% in their thirties, 24.9% in their forties, 10.0% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties.

Note that the headline is a bit of a stretch on the truth, but I’ve got limited space and want to keep it snappy! I love lightning myself, and I have many fond memories of sitting in the evening cool on terraces in Southern France or Austria watching huge storms firing bolts into the surrounding hillsides. Conversely, wifey is extremely wary of them, and as soon as she hears a rumble of thunder, it’s off with the TV and air conditioner until the storm passes.

However, I am rather sceptical about the 20% who say they are unaware that lightning can damage electronics! Was there something odd in the wording of the question?
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Last month japan.internet.com reported the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research regarding the use of support call centres. They interviewed 330 people employed in both the public and private sectors; 83.0% were male, 10.0% in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 32.7% in their forties, 14.5% in their fifties, and 0.9% in their sixties.

I’ve once phoned a support line in Japanese for a problem with my ISP’s free router and the ADSL performance. The ISP was another division of the company I work for, and the notebook PC I was trying to connect with was a company-issue machine with the standard company installed software, but still they started the script from “Are you sure you’re plugged in?” The problem was something to do with performance being dreadful – I’d changed providers but the throughtput dropped from a few megs a second to barely dial-up speeds, and uploading even the shortest mail would time out. I finally convinced them it was their fault, not mine, that the line was slow, but it still took them another week or so to do whatever they needed to do at their end to restore the speed.
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At the start of May MyVoice surveyed the members of their internet community by means of a private survey regarding portable music players. They got 14,913 valid responses to their internet questionnaire, with 54% of the sample female, 4% in their teens, 21% in their twentiesm 39% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

I have a Sony hard disk-based music player on test, but rather than a product review (I’ve mentioned it before myself, and Gen Kanai has a long thread or three on issues with the software) I’ll review myself. Before I got the machine on loan, I hadn’t used a portable player since perhaps my university days.

The first thing I noticed, for perhaps three or four days wearing it on my commute to work, was that the world seemed different; I felt I was stepping back from reality into a little cocoon that shielded me from some of the – well, I don’t really know what, just a transparent bubble that kept everyone else from intruding into my personal aural space, and to some extent my consciousness too. Once these feelings faded – or at least until I assimilated them as a normal commuting state – and as I started loading the player up with a decent amount of music, I noticed I was becoming a very selfish and intolerant listener. Before, I used standard CDs almost exclusively, and even ripped content was played on a per album basis, and I’d often keep the same album loaded up for days if not weeks at a time, playing it over and over. Now, with 300 tracks at my fingertips I find myself hitting the Next Track button an awful lot, tracks get marked down on a whim, and I find myself seeking out my favourites far too often. Part can be attributed to a lack of functionality in the software on the player; I’d love an enhanced random shuffle mode that took into account rating when selecting what to play so I’d only hear my one star tracks once in a blue moon, and skipping a track before getting past the intro downrates it a bit.

I think I should get rid of the player before it destroys my sense of musical appreciation completely, and buy a 128Mb player that I can only load one or two albums at a time onto. Yes, I’ll never listen to music on that player again.

Meanwhile, back at the survey, the Japanese people had this to say about the matter.
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japan.internet.com recently published a survey conducted JR Tokai Express Research on the use of home networking. They interviewed 330 people from all over the country to find out their views. 60.6% of the sample was male; age demographics were 20.3% in their twenties, 31.2% in their thirties, 27.9% in their forties, 15.5% in their fifties, and 5.2% in their sixties.

My personal experience with “wartraining” (like wardriving, only from the train!) is that on my ride home I can pick up about 60 or so open wireless access points according to NetStumbler, the bulk of them being Yahoo BB! wireless routers in their default configuration. Sadly this survey (or at least the free preview that I have translated) did not ask any security-related questions.
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Having recently looked at what people do when their computer has a problem, now NEPROJAPAN co, ltd recently carried out a survey to find out about users’ experiences regarding problems with their mobile phones either breaking or getting lost. One day in mid-May of this year they posted an open self-selecting questionnaire to the three leading mobile phone companies’ (iMode, Vodafone live! and EZweb) menu systems and got 3,695 valid replies. The sample was 60% female, 3% in their teens, 37% in their twenties, 43% in their thirties, and 17% aged forty or older.

My phone currently has a half-dead sub-screen, but apart from that, I once lost an earlier phone in a taxi somewhere. Luckily I actually had a backup of my address book as I’d just bought some connection software and had been playing around with it. Since then, however, I must admit to being remiss about backups, although pictures do get semi-regularly offloaded and imported into my PC whenever the internal memory fills up.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, published the results of research into personal computer maintenance. They interview 300 people, exactly 50:50 male and female, and exactly 20% aged 18 or 19, and 20% in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.

I can’t say I regularly clean inside my PC, if at all, except to just blow dust out of the way when putting new bits in! I wonder if the virus scan option in Q2SQ includes a spyware check?
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, recently carried out some research to find out how people used webcams. They interviewed 334 people from all over the country; 71.6% were male, 18.0% in their twenties, 37.7% in their thirties, 30.2% in their forties, 12.6% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixtiees.

Unfortunately, this report of the survey results does not give any information about the frequency of use of these web cameras. I would not be surprised, however, if the average user uses it just once or twice then the novelty wears off, but perhaps I’m just biased as I have a dislike of appearing on camera, both still and moving!
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked at how people obtained and used audio and video contents at home. They interviewed 1,046 members of goo’s internet monitor group from all over the country by means of a private web-based questionnaire. 55.7% of the sample were female, 22.7% in their twenties, 42.6% in their thirties, 24.2% in their forrties, 7.7% in their fifties and 2.8% sixty years old or more.

The one very surprising outcome from this survey is that almost one in five has paid to download video contents! Perhaps the full results of this survey describe what type of contents people are paying for, but I have my suspicions… Conversely, only 3% admit to using P2P software.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, looked at what people thought about mobile phone cameras. They interviewed 150 male and 150 female mobile phone owners from up and down the country; 20.0% were aged 18 or 19, and similarly 20.0% in each of the twenties, thrities, forties, and fifties age bands.

My current camera has a mere 60,000 pixels, so all it produces are pretty muddy images that look awful even on the tiny screen! However, the QR Code reader is an excellent feature that’s well-supported by many print magazines, but as I understand it they are still to make headway in the rest of the world.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, looked at how picky people were about their mobile phones. They interviewed by means of a private internet questionnaire 300 people equally split between male and female. Similarly, 16.6% were in their teens (18 or 19 years old only), and the same 16.6% in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties.

Exactly what consistutes pickiness is not defined within the survey. Whether it is manufacturer, colour, price, feature set, or any other element that makes people hum and haw over their selection, we do not know. Perhaps the fuller results of this survey may clear up this matter, but we shall never know!
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