Han Bites Dog

From out of nowhere

2010-08-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

Marmot's Hole some time ago pointed out that Wikileaks' Afghan War Logs had been reported to contain information pointing to a missile deal between the Taliban and North Korea. But the information referred to is not in the Afghan War Log leaks made so far. You can download the lot, if you like, and search for HELMEND, the telltale misspelling of Helmand province. There are no results for this, or other words and phrases in the log, and searching by date yields nothing.
Pressed on this Jeff Stein, rather than pointing out a link to the specific record, eventually linked to an excel spreadsheet created by the Guardian. It is in the spreadsheet, but why is the Guardian including information that isn't in the War Logs leak? Does the Guardian already have the remaining information referred to on the War Logs page in Wikileaks?
As it is, there is no indication of where the information came from.

All tied up

2010-06-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

USA Today got its typing in a twist as it hurriedly scribbled about the United States' Michael Bradley's dissatisfaction with the referee, taking dozens of other sites with it.

As the final whistle blew in the USA’s 2-2 draw with Algeria, Michael Bradley rushed toward the referee, just as he did when Maurice Edu’s goal in the 85th minute was disallowed

Bradley had a point, the referee was terrible. But the game was against Slovenia.

Laser-guided shot in the dark

2010-06-04T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Korea Herald yesterday reported that Kim Jong-il had disappeared, his last known whereabouts being 12 days previously. This was taken as a sign that the end is nigh for the Kims.
Worse still, the NK leadership is an easy target, the paper says on the same page, for precision bombing. Apparently the Iraq war was a good example of this. As you'll remember, Sadam Hussein was bombed instantly, and wasn't at all found years after the war started hiding in a bunker.
Curiously though, the article doesn't go into detail about how the Allies (for it will be them) will manage to precision bomb Kim Jong-il when they don't know where he is. Amazing what modern technology can do, isn't it?

Factory flaw

2010-06-04T06:44:00.001-07:00

It's a sad and sober point. The Foxconn factory that has been in the news for a spate of suicides has seen 12 of its 420,000 workers commit suicide this year, a rate that pales in significance when compared to the suicide rate in Korea.
That's 3 per 100,000 in six months or 6 per 100,000 a year.
That figure is less than a quarter of the suicide rate of Korea in 2008 - 26 per 100,000. A report on Wednesday said that the number of suicides had hit a new record, rising 18.8 percent. There has been no significant change in overall population in the last few years, so one can only presume that the rate has risen similarly, to 29 per 100,000 -almost five times the rate of the Foxconn factory.

To 3D or not 3D

2010-06-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

There have been several blog posts (here and here) where people, including me, have pointed out that the torpedo design pictured in many news articles and at the presentation does not match the :found remains. However, I think this may be down to one small thing: The South Korean government is not very good at colouring in.
At the center of the argument are four main differences, as outlined in the photo from the Willyloman blog.
They are:
A: The end is narrower in the design than on the torpedo.
B: The recess on the propeller in the design is not evident in the wreckage
D: The area between the propellers is different.
C: A part on the design seems to be in a different place on the wreckage.
A better quality image cna be found here.It should also be noted that this was one of two designs shown. They appear to be the same design, but the one in the image above shows some of the design coloured in or outlined for illustrative purposes. The other one can be seen (though not very clearly) in this video. Here's a snapshot:Note the two hatched and cross-hatched areas that I have very amateurishly arrowed.
Note also that this is a cross section. The object is round, so these are probably tapered cylinders attached to the fins of the propeller. The hub, if that isn't an already used up word.
Here's a closer view of the coloured in diagram.

You can see here that the illustrators have chosen to render the shaft and the piece of engine as a simlified 3D rendering. For some reason, the propellers have not been rendered in 3D. Equally strange, the gubbins marked 3 has been left out entirely. This could be due to lack of information, and because they didn't have enough of the rest of the design to draw it.However, even on this scale, you can see that the outline of the rear propeller has not been done properly: it isn't even symmetrical.
You can also see that the part marked C on the Willyloman blog doesn't clearly match anything in the found object.
Going closer in:

You can see the hatched areas mentioned above have not been included in the outline at 2 and 3.
But these are clearly part of the propeller, and must surely be the drum they are attached to (or whatever the correct term is). The lack of symmetry in the back of the outline is really bloody obvious here too.
So what would it look like if the hatched areas were included? Well it would make the hub look much broader. It would be longer too. The line marked "butt" is approximately where the hub would end. After this is taken into account, the design looks much more like the propeller that was found. Moreover, the indentation (marked 1 in my photo and B on the Willyloman blog) is actually inside the hub, between the drum and the shaft, and not between the drum and the blades as argued.
There are an awful lot of questions that remain about the incident. But most of them do not relate to the cause of the sinking. They pertain more to the circumstances of the sinking, how the North was able to do it, and why it took so long to rescue the sailors.
As for this particular question, the government has been woeful in its response, and it's one they could have cleared up much more quickly and simply. Perhaps they wanted to keep face. There are also questions about the media, whose wish to save face (and not just in Korea) is legendary.
The government must have known the coloured in diagram was more photogenic, so why did they do such a sloppy job of it? Meanwhile, the media, having swapped accuracy for a brighter photo, have done little to address the concerns raised.

It's the economy...

2010-06-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

New York Times (via Kushibo) reports that President Lee is getting a popularity boost from the Cheonan.

Soon after taking office two years ago, Mr. Lee appeared at risk of losing public support, as he faced mass demonstrations on the streets of Seoul against the import of United States beef. Now, political experts are talking about the “Cheonan effect,” as polls show that more than half of expected voters approve of the president and his tougher line toward the North.

...

“The Cheonan is having a huge effect by pushing voters to rally around the flag,” said Kim Ki-shik, a political analyst at the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, a policy research group.A telephone poll of 800 likely voters conducted Saturday by the East Asia Institute, a political research group, found that 52 percent of respondents approved of Mr. Lee in May, up from 46 percent a month earlier.

But a month earlier was in April, which was still after the Cheonan sank, and the Hankyoreh was very keen to report a drop in approval after the sinking. Irrespective of findings, Pyongyang has always been the main suspect for the sinking, so the increase in perception of the threat from the North would not have changed since April.
In fact, Lee's popularity at 52 percent puts him roughly where he started at the beginning of the year, when the Korea Times reported support of 51.6 percent (you do the rounding). Perhaps the dip was due to right-wingers looking for a more firm response. Perhaps people's doubts have been eased since the conclusion of the probe. Whatever the reason for the dip in support, there doesn't appear to be any net change in support.
Lee's popularity is probably more to do with the economy, as this report attests, with Lee, and his party slowly climbing in approval ratings throughout the second half of 2009.

And the winner is...

2010-05-26T06:19:00.000-07:00

The new official english nickname for makgeolli is "drunken rice."
Yep you read that right. Apparently the alternatives under consideration were "makohol" and "makelixhir." Jesus. Why don't they just call it "tramp's breakfast?"
Incidentally, drunken rice is already the name of a Thai dish. Which you eat. How you could possibly think drunken rice was an appropriate name for a drink, and not a food, I don't know.

Built on Sand

2010-05-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

President Lee Myung-bak announced in more detail actions South Korea would take against Pyongyang on Monday, including a halt on imports. According to the FT, South Korea imported $73m worth of sand in 2008, twice as much as its income from Gaeseong.
Which brings us neatly on to Lee's Grand Canal project.
Lee's project to turn the peninsula into some sort of industrial age venice was set to cost a staggering sum -- $16 billion odd. Lee tried to quieten critics by insisting that up to two-thirds of the cost would be paid for by sale of the sand and gravel that would be dug up during its construction.
This disappeared around the time of the Mad Cow Madness of 2008, and has since been scaled down to form the 4 River Restoration Project. Critics call this an introduction of the canal plan by stealth.
The question is -- and was at the time -- who is going to buy the sand? Sand costs a fortune to transport and a fortune to store, so an immediate, nearby buyer is necessary to recover those costs in full. China exports sand to the rest of East Asia for free, via the wind. It isn't going to be buying sand from anybody soon. That leaves customers in Korea, Japan and North Korea.
Pyongyang doesn't have the cash, unless Seoul hands it over, effectively making any sale to the North a deal bankrolled by the South Korean taxpayer. South Korea might use it in land reclamation, tidal barrages, or the construction of nuclear power plants or whacking great canals. Again, this is bankrolled by the taxpayer. Private companies may buy a fair bit, but it isn't exactly obvious why they would need so much more so suddenly. Japanese government agencies and companies might use it, but again the sudden surge in demand was never explained.
It's impossible to say what Lee was thinking when he suggested the cost would be covered by the sale of sand. Did he have other big projects in mind, or was it all a big fib? Maybe he had just completely miscalculated. Whatever the deal is, South Korea now has a $73 million hole in its sand supplies. If only there was some sort of government project that could fill it...

Blind botchmakers

2010-05-20T17:23:00.000-07:00

How to describe the North Korean currency reforms of late last year?

The Korea Herald goes with "botched." Over and over again.
The Joongang Daily calls it "failed" (also here) and also uses botched liberally.
The Korea Times calls it a fiasco, and also uses failed and botched, although with less alacrity than the others. It also calls it "so-called," but its worth bearing in mind that Korean papers use that expression in a different way to Westerners.
The Chosun Ilbo sees it as "disastrous." It also uses the words "sudden," and "shock" to describe the reform, underlining the portrayal it wants to project of North Korea as unstable.
The Hankyoreh is more circumspect, saying public sentiment "grew chaotic" in the wake of the reform. Although even it links the reforms to people dying of starvation.

This is all very well, but how much was it botched? Surely the Joongang, Chosun and Herald do not think the North was genuinely acting in the interests of its people.
The execution of the project's mastermind hardly speaks of everything going swimmingly in the eyes of the dear leader. However, this doesn't mean much. If the North operates on the basis that most of its people are in a position of effective serfdom, the presence of an emerging middle class was threatening to the leadership's security. Many, including Cheong Seong-chang, senior fellow at the Sejong Institute, think that the reform was designed to wipe out much of the wealth of the middle class.
The mechanism is simple, and gives the lie to the idea that this was a simple currency reform. The North Koreans did not just cross zeroes off the notes, they printed new ones and limited the availability of them to 650,000 won (about $250 according to the Time article). Essentially, then, this meant that in theory nobody would have more than $250. Except that as the Time article points out, much of this middle class had already converted to dollars or yuan.
Is this what the papers mean by botched?
The message in the articles is muddled. Some allude to starvation, some unrest, some inflation and others currency instability and a slowing in the influx of consumer goods from China. The North probably wishes to quell unrest, but there isn't much evidence that it gives a shit about its poor, and it may actually want to stop consumer imports from China.

Black is the new black

2010-05-13T18:41:00.000-07:00

The Herald Biz, in its wisdom, has decided that the stock market fall on friday be dubbed "Black Friday."
Perhaps someone should tell them that Black Friday is the Friday after thanksgiving, when retailers traditionally go into the black, and is therefore a good thing.

Fusing fusion technologies

2010-05-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

North Korea claimed yesterday that it had made a breakthrough in nuclear fusion for apparently civilian purposes, prompting NK watchers to wonder what sort of weapons it might be used in.
According to the Chosun, what the Rodong Sinmun said was:

Scientists have achieved brilliant success in nuclear fusion reaction... It brought a solid breakthrough toward the development of new energy.

New energy sounds like civilian use, but it is a very blanket term that could mean anything. Certainly some people think the North intends to use the tech (should it exist) in weapons. Cue massive cognitive dissonance.
People who think the use would be civilian (see Yang Hyung-lyeol in the KT article) make the perfectly valid point that advanced countries (including Korea) have been collaborating to develop fusion power for some time and haven't yet been successful. It's therefore implausible that the North has somehow managed it using left over chicken wire. It's just too advanced, and too expensive.
This gets overlapped with military use, in all the stories but especially this one.
Problem is civilain use is very advanced, only rich countries are even pursuing it, and they aren't successful, but military use is comparitively simple -- India managed it in 1974. So the advanced argument doesn't work. Of course, there might be other reasons why NK can't have developed an H-bomb, but the fact that Europeans are struggling to develop civilian fusion isn't one of them.

Universal Wealth Care

2010-01-22T18:09:00.000-08:00

The Universal Studios Korea project is back on track thanks to a consortium of investors agreeing to invest in building and running the park. Somehow they have managed to agree to build on a 4 square kilometer patch of reclaimed land without finding out how much the land is going to cost. The price is still being negotiated with the landowner.
Surely this is handing the landowner a blank cheque? Never mind, after all the owner is the Korea Water Resources Corporation, owned by the government - that is, the taxpayer. So, how much will the government squeeze out of them on your behalf?
Vice Minister Kwon Do-yup says it will be a 'logical price.' That's right Kwonny, don't mince your words.
As a basic comprehension exercise, readers can themselves work out what a logical price is.
Is it:
a) The market price
b) A price much lower than the market price, in reflection of the low value historically placed on the land
c) Leased out for free, in recognition of the general benefit to the economy the project will have

White men have bigger ****s

2010-01-21T18:12:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered what a white person looks like? Here's a picture of one.

Strictly for medicinal purposes

2010-01-19T18:14:00.000-08:00

Good news for alcoholics: the government has decided that, far from being something that gives you liver sclerosis and makes you die, alcohol is a life giving healthfood.

When beverages are categorized as dietary supplements, the amount of tax on them is lower than taxes on alcoholic beverages. Currently, the tax on takju is 5 percent while a 30 percent tax is imposed on yakju.

(Btw. I think this is the wrong way round. yakju is “medicinal wine,” takju is “table wine.”)

The finance ministry expects the new committee to exclude some dietary supplements from the list of alcoholic beverages.

With makgeolli oft touted as some kind of healthy option, it seems that this is what they have in mind. You can see some of the live-giving health benefits of makgeolli here.

Shipbuilding sector unaffected by foot-and-mouth

2010-01-15T18:18:00.000-08:00

You might be forgiven for reading this report twice. Exports, says the Agriculture ministry, will be unaffected by the recent foot-and-mouth outbreak. How so? Surely they can't continue meat exports at a time like this?

"Shipments of meat to our main export markets have all been suspended," Chang Jae-hong, deputy director of the labeling, quarantine and inspection division of the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, told The Korea Herald.

Crikey that's a relief. But then how come exports are unaffected?

"But I'd say the volume is not big enough to pose as a threat to our country's overall exports," he stressed.

Ah, right. So, meat exports are cancelled, but it won't affect the exports of ships, cars, mobile phones and nuclear reactors. Well, no shit sherlock.
He goes on:

"A lot of Chinese dairy products were replaced by Korean ones in the aftermath of the melamine crisis, and at the time, Korea had banned imports of some Chinese dairy products, so now, the Chinese government is using this FMD outbreak as the chance to reopen the Korean market," Chang said.

This is interesting. I'm sure China would love to use this as leverage to get back into the Korean market. But a move away from Chinese dairy came from safety concerns. An outbreak of a disease in Korea (which isn't harmful to humans anyway) doesn't make Chinese products any safer.

Fuzzy picture

2009-12-29T18:40:00.000-08:00

3D TV Services to Start in October, says the Korea Times. Really? No. The KCC is going to allow a test 3D TV broadcast to coincide with next year's G20 summit. Let's hope it's not actually OF the summit. I don't think anybody really needs to see Lee Myung-bak's ugly mug in 3-D.

Bridge over troubled water

2009-12-10T06:25:00.000-08:00

The government is desperate to keep on with its massive water schemes, notably the famous 4-river project, set to cost $6bn, of which $1.5bn is allocated in next years budget and the rest is to be paid, apparently, via a complicated system of IOU notes and a lot of washing up. No wonder objectors are furious.
Perhaps they will be tempted to take the public-private partnership route of the Incheon Bridge, which saw all that debt go off the government books, despite the government being liable for it. A neat little trick, which would have been neater if the partner it had chosen hadn't got its wrist slapped to the tune of 5 million quid.

Saipan은 우리 땅~!

2009-11-22T06:26:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that Saipan is part of Korea. It's bad enough that it isn't part of Korea, but that it IS part of the U.S. is shocking. The lack of decent reporting on Korea from overseas is another reason why things are so bad here.

nicked from Monster Island

Halfway house

2009-11-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

Korean rice farmers are having a terrible time of it. First the politicians are stealing all their subsidies, then they have a bumper harvest, right when no bugger wants to eat the stuff.
Previous governments have shored up prices in Korea's protected rice market by giving about 10% of the crop to their northern brethren, an act that went down quite well with Kim Jong-il but less so with the South's conservatives, particularly when they found out it was feeding the NK army.
So no rice for Pyongyang in the last two years, but that's seen rice prices go down the toilet, so much so that there are reports of farmers not even bothering to harvest the crop.
The government has responded by having a drive to eat more rice, encouraging companies to formulate new rice products and extolling anyone who'll listen to drink more makgeolli. As if anyone in Korea needed telling.
Great news, then, that Nongshim have come up with a new rice noodle product.

The rice product line was the result of over one year of research and development efforts with more than 50 billion won worth of investments on the R&D and setting up of production facilities.
...
Market opening and globalization, which has raised overseas travel and cultural exchanges, have been changing lifestyles, including Westernizing people's eating habits.
Slowing demand pushed President Lee Myung-bak to officially order the government in August to adopt measures to increase domestic rice consumption. He also proposed providing some of the stockpile to food companies at a reduced cost to encourage production of processed rice-based products.

Shame, then, that half the rice comes from Thailand. Of course, maybe the different properties of Thai rice are needed, and it uses up the import quota, at least. But they shouldn't be trying to pass this off as a big favor to the Korean rice farmer.

Superstars

2009-11-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

Hats off to Yonhap News Agency, with their sterling coverage of the Leonid meteor shower.
Amongst the images they produced is this one, which appears to feature meteors moving so fast that you can't see them at all [/sarcasm]
(the lines are stars that move due to Earth's rotation).

Our friends electric

2009-11-04T06:32:00.000-08:00

Great news for Korea's robotics industry. The Ministry of Knowledge Economy says it reckons the industry is heading for bumper growth. Which is convenient, considering the government has has earmarked it as a "future growth engine." Conflict of interest? Naaaah
The industry has also managed to achieve decent growth thus far. How? by getting the ministry to stump up the cash.

Fat figures

2009-10-25T06:35:00.000-07:00

Korea’s population is getting fatter according to recent reports, including this one by Yonhap. English coverage, albeit shorter, of the same story is here.

The headline figure given in the article is probably approximately correct, but other figures in the Yonhap piece are clearly sloppy.

The article says that 1 in three Koreans is now obese, based on the results of annual health check-ups on adults subscribed to the national health insurance scheme – some 10 million people.

This is a good sample size, obviously, and should give a nice bell-shaped-ish curve.

Defining overweight as having a BMI of more than 25, the article says that 3,240,694 are in that category.

특히 지난해 비만판정자 가운데 고도비만자(BMI 25이상 30미만)는 44만 8천574명으로 2006년 27만 817명과 2007년 26만 4천70명에 비해 급격히 증가했다.

(“In particular, among the number of overweight people who are very obese (BMI 25-30) was 448,574, a sharp rise from 270,817 in 2206, and 264,070 in 2007.)

Clearly “very obese” does not correlate to 25-30, since overweight starts at 25. More over, this would put the vast majority of the 3 million or so overweight people in the BMI 30-40 category, which is absurd.

This is just sloppy reporting. The figures here are obviously wrong, and anyone with any common sense can tell that. But similar mistakes happen all over the Korean press, many of them much harder to detect, and can have much worse effects.

Worse is reporters’ habit of copying each others’ work. This report, ostensibly by one “sjchoi,” contains 4 paragraphs identical to ones in the Yonhap piece, including the offending sentence.

Most other media simply used the Yonhap copy, these figures are now everywhere.

One is the magic number

2009-10-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

Hold your incredulity, journalists are part of the 'intelligentsia,' and they're not fit to govern:

The "intelligentsia" - the group made up of professors, lawyers, journalists and accountants - scored lowest on a survey designed to test suitability for public posts, which was released yesterday by an institute of Seoul National University

This is all part of a survey of people of various proffessions to see how pure of heart they were and how fit to govern. it continues:

In the PLI, the "intelligentsia" - a category invented by the researchers - scored 310.70, the lowest among the five groups - a total of 30 people - participating in the survey. The perfect PLI score is 1,200. The other survey groups are politicians, bureaucrats, chief executive officers and non-governmental organization activists.

Nice. So that's 30 people in 5 groups. 6 people per group. This group has "journalists, lawyers, professors and accountants" so that's less than two of each, i.e. one from some. So they asked one lawyer to do a survey, and now they know how lawyers think. What's the sound of one hand clapping?

It has developed the PSAI with an aim of complementing the government's "rudimentary" human resources database and developing a training module for future leaders.

no wonder they can't get it right....

The PC end of Nazi science

2009-10-20T06:33:00.000-07:00

Korea Computer Life Institute was in the news recently, warning that some kids were more vulnerable than others to the perils of computer game addiction.
Who was most at risk? Kids with type A blood. Slow handclaps all round.
The blood type personality thing is nazi pseudoscience, developed initially to prove the superiority of the Arian race, but was imported by allies Japan. From there it has spread, and has some popularity in Asia. The general population treats it no more or less seriously than horrorscopes -- just a bit of harmless fun -- but the pseudoscientific nature of it means that some people (including this institute) take it more seriously.
Rather than requiring proof that there is any basis to blood type traits, KCLI has taken it as read. The institute took 114 counselling patients -- it doesn't say how they were selected -- and found 42 percent of them were type A. How surprising is this? Not very. Using this (admittedly not that reliable) source of blood type distribution in Korea, 34 percent are type A, so there is a fairly good chance (10%) that this would have happened for type A anyway, just by chance.
They just totted up the numbers and put a ring around the biggest one. There seems to have been no predictive hypothesis, so presumably they would have cited any similarly disproportionately represented blood group.It doesn't end there -- there's roughly the same probability that a similarly significant number of other blood types would have shown up. To put it another way: The chances that a sample of 100 people would have almost exactly the same proportions of each blood type as the rest of the population is pretty small, so one or two are likely to show up more than the others. It's odds on that when you've finished counting you'll be able to put a ring around one blood group or another and claim that they are more vulnerable.
In other words if B-type was higher than expected, and not A, they would have said that B-type people were more vulnerable.
That's like throwing a dart at a dartboard and saying "yeah! I was aiming for 16!" after it's landed.
Then we have the other findings, younger children are less vulnerable not because their elder siblings won't let them on the computer but because they are under less stress. Older children are more vulnerable not because their parents supervise them less, but because they are under pressure. Perhaps the pressure to get results is one reason they came for counselling in the first place - desperately wanting their kids to be the brightest in the class, they blame computer games on their child's poor performance and drag them off to counselling.
No credit is given to the games themselves: If stress is a reason, perhaps computer games can releive stress. We are told that the average counselling patient has an IQ of 133, but this is because intelligent people are more vulnerable. There is apparently no consideration that this may be because computer games boost your IQ.
Are these kids even addicted? We don't know how the students were selected (although it may have been the first 114 they could sign up, or the only patients they had) but there is an "am I an addict?" checklist on the institute's site.
There is a checklist of ten items to check whether you might be an addict. They are disconcerting aspects of behavior (I get violent if I am not allowed to play computer games; I swear if I am not allowed computer games) but not necessarily signs of addiction. Both the above could be signs of other problems. On the other hand, swearing might be fairly normal for a teenager, whereas young kids hitting their siblings is hardly unheard of. There is no indication of frequency or severity, so parents can be quite plastic in their interpretation. At the other end of things (I have lied so that I can play computer games; I stay past my bedtime to play video games) the options seem like the actions of a normal teenager.
God knows what parents are told when they get there, or what the parents think of it when they are told their child has an addiction, and one hopes that such diagnoses are genuine, but on the basis of the above, it doesn't seem likely.
And the results of the survey are next to useless. I don't believe that Koreans will swallow any old crap, but someone paid for this to be written in a newspaper. Worse, someone paid for it to be done in the first place. If I was them I'd want my money back.

Rough translation:

Researchers have found that intelligent boys are more likely to fall prey to computer game addiction.

Korea Computer Life Institute collected research from 114 students who had undergone counselling with the center between July and September and found that those with type A blood, a high IQ and no siblings faced the highest risk of developing video game addiction.

There were 111 boys and 3 girls, showing that boys were more at risk. The biggest group was high school students (36.6%) followed by middle schoolers (25.4%) university students (24.6%) and elementary school kids (11.4%) showing that the risk was greatest for high-school students.

By blood type, type A was the most common (42.1%) followed by B (27.2%) O (19.3%) and AB (11.4%), meaning that those with type A were vulnerable. Addiction was more common in only children and eldest sons (59% and 31.6% respectively) while younger siblings made up just 4.4% of cases.

They concluded that the only children were most at risk because they were under more pressure from their family. The kids studied for game addiction had an average IQ of 133, meaning that more intelligent children were more at risk.

A spokesman for the center said “Game addiction develops in boys gradually over a period of time and strengthens” and “when addiction becomes apparent they need professional counselling, and after that they need plenty of care and attention.”