http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8592286
In comparison with a lot of other 3D GUMI dance videos I've been seeing (most of them are quite terrible), this one has much better dance coordination; the design for this GUMI isn't so bad either. If only the quality of the video wasn't so bad...
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8600686
OH YEA THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT
EDIT: OH WAIT HERE IT IS HAHA MY BAD
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8568000
EDIT: This one isn't exactly eyecandy like the previous ones but it gets props for being hilarious. LOL RANDOM KAITO
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8418859
29.10.09
28.10.09
GUMI meets...
Original by みつか
PixIV Link: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=4497677
Once again by the awesome team of G4oPTG. :V
Expenses
Suddenly, my interest in applying for John Hopkins has dropped significantly.
http://www.campusgrotto.com/colleges-with-the-highest-total-cost.html
http://www.campusgrotto.com/colleges-with-the-highest-total-cost.html
27.10.09
GUMI BEAM, translated
Yes I know it was practically self explanatory anyway BUT THAT MEANT THE TRANSLATION MUST BE EASY SO IT MUST BE DONE.
ANOTHER WONDERFUL WORK BY THE AWESOME SCANLATION GROUP G4oPTG.
ANOTHER WONDERFUL WORK BY THE AWESOME SCANLATION GROUP G4oPTG.
22.10.09
SfN 2009
Like all conventions, the Society for Neuroscience 2009 convention needs a writeup too. Actually, this is more than just a summary of what I did at the convention and what interesting things happened; this is also a list for me to refer back to to know what research I thought was important and what schools I'm applying to.
For privacy purposes only the first two letters of a person's first name is used. I'm the one who knows who they all are anyway. :D
Friday
-Having baggage apparently costs 20 dollars and I accidentally selected that I wanted Premier stuff or whatever (which was another 38 dollars) so I managed to waste over 50 dollars before I even headed off to Chicago. This trip sounded awesome already!
-Noted that while quality of food in United Airlines might be a bit better than China Eastern, the flight attendants in the former are significantly older than that of the latter. Also, possibly associated with age, they are REALLY SLOW at handing out drinks. That, and the food/snacks cost money too.
-Arrived at the O'Hare airport, found out that the airport was conveniently located 2 hours away from where my friend's house is (and where I was staying). And also that she didn't have a car so we had to take train/bus all the way back. Upon arrival, stuff was dropped off, a meal was eaten at a local restaurant, and fatigue was prompting us to sleep as soon as we were done.
Saturday
-Originally there were very little plans for Saturday since there weren't any poster sessions of my interest but it ended up to be a busy day
-After figuring out how to get to the convention center in the most roundabout way I checked in and received the programme.
-Hueg programme is HUEG. Imagine the anime expo programme. Now imagine a book of it multiplied by 3. There were 7 books all around that average size as the programme for Neuroscience 2009. Safe to say I was not amused lugging 7 books around the entire day.
-Went out to eat lunch with CA, a high school acquaintance. It's interesting to meet people after 5 years and see where they are now. Apparently in graduate school, which is where I'm going too. Also, apparently married. Which does not seem to be quite where I'm going right now...We talked about our works and Los Angeles and Chicago and other stuff. I learned there is a such thing as computational linguistics and they almost do the same thing as I do. Looks like I can get into any field with computational simulations!
-I went back to the conference to check out one of the posters from my lab. There I met SE, one of the big guys from the company sponsoring our research. We shook hands and he told me about the situation of the company, and how many pharmaceutical companies are interested in our stuff. It's all business. And it's alllll right. (the state of our research and the future of the company, that is)
-Found a poster shortly after about A new, incredibly accurate algorithm for determining error around edges in images, something interesting for computer vision. Admittedly I felt stupid because I couldn't quite know exactly how the algorithm worked, but it had to do something with partitioning one image, then partitioning the same image in another way, then comparing the two images... I think. Regardless it was remarkably accurate; for example, an image that might have more miscounts due to noise might have an accurate "edge" of an image, but an image that has less miscounts yet has a specific miscount next to the edge might seem more accurate overall, but is actually more inaccurate because now the edge looks like it has some kind of bump. This algorithm corrects for this kind of thing. Dr. TU, who was in charge of this project, also referred me to some other people from his school doing some computational neuroscience work, and I'm thankful for that.
-After that I went to visit my old advisor, RE, at a bar. AL and her boyfriend came and visited also. Eventually, SA, one of RE's new lab coworkers, and the person letting me crash at her place, PH, all joined to hang out. We hung out and talked about lab research, lab drama, football, stuff that doesn't work in lab and makes us angry, more football, other sports, where to eat, what to eat, finding a place to wait for our pizza to be cooked, what we wanted to drink at starbucks, japanese hair color, and traps. And yes I was amazed we somehow got onto the topic of traps.
-Eventually our Deep Dish Pizza was ready and, even if it looked small, it was a BIG thing. Even with like 6 people we could not finish it, so I was allowed to take it back to my friend's place. The leftover pizza was to be my breakfast for the next 4 days.
Sunday
-Lots of stuff happened on this day, since Neuroinformatics poster session was in the morning and Simulations was in the afternoon.
-There were a lot of graph-theory related research in the morning too (Seperate from Neuroinformatics). In one type of research "Fault Diagnosis Engineering", they try to determine protein network interaction to determine what kind of treatment is appropriate.
-Another network project involved an attempt to map post-translational proteins from different sections (synapse, cytosol, nucleus). They mostly looked into proteins that get phosphorylated right after translation, I think, and used a pulldown assay for that. They also did some stuff with histones.
-There was some research on Neurodegenerative Networks at Northwestern University. Seems to emphasize how many neurodegenerative diseases and cancer seem to have common networks to go by. Quite interesting.
-The Salk Institute is trying to make a 2-in-1 MRI and EEG machine!
-Some very enthusiastic person explained his research to me in using vectors to determine flow rate in the Perforant and Hippocampal areas of the brain. Honestly while I was listening I was like "this is all good and interesting but how will this ever be useful". I think maybe it will be useful to determine how drugs will flow into the system... or maybe the flow has something to do with how memory or other parts of the brain work? ...Ok yea I'm still not too sure what's its usefulness is right now.
-So along to ACTUAL NEUROINFORMATICS STUFF, there's various programs and interesting development going on. A lot of database stuff (of course). In one poster they're trying to form a database connecting symptoms of diseases in humans with animal models, since that may not always be very obvious when you're ordering your Alzheimer-diseased mouse.
-Apparently there was this poster on some program "GENMA" from the universeity of British Columbia but I'm googling it and nothing is coming up. I'm sad. :(
-The National Taiwan University is making a database of MRI images.
-There was this one computer science person who was making a list of words that are mentioned in science articles, then grouping them all together. I think this is like saying the word "hippocampus" is usually closely associated with the word "memory" in journal articles, or something to that extent. IMO I could not determine what exactly was the difference between what he was trying to do, and what a search engine does already at pubMed.
-Slim-Prim at University of Tennessee- https://ctsi.utmem.edu/gateway.php I think it tries to connect clinical data with research data.
-Neuroscience Information Framework BIIIIG neuroscience website that's acting like Neuroscience wikipedia + Neuroscience google. Heck, it IS Neuroscience Google. Seems like people from UCSD and Caltech are working on it.
-Waxholm Space and the INCF Digital Atlasing Program- making a world map of the Rat Brain. Many people, including UCSD (again!) are involved in this.
-After the Neuroinformatics poster session I found SU, my coworker, at a seminar. The seminar was pretty boring unfortunately; she and her friend RO were falling asleep. It had to do something with determining whether the X and Y chromosomes themselves determined gender identity, or if a particular gene which encodes for the generation of testosterone or some other hormones determined it.
-We set up our own poster afterwards. SU had to stay by her poster so I had to go get lunch by myself. I had a McDonalds hamburger which, later on, I thought was a bad idea since I had malaise almost the entire day afterwards and for the next 2 days at the convention center. Well, I don't directly associate it with the McDonalds hamburger but it sucks that I was at not quite the best condition to run around and learn neuroscience from everyone.
-There were some interesting topics in the simulation poster session #1. The first thing that caught my eye was a project some people were doing in Japan on connecting various different simulation and modeling programs together to make one larger system. Considering how we were trying to get Java to work with C, and then python, I (and my lab coworkers) became REALLY INTERESTED in where this work is going to go.
-A really overly happy but friendly guy from Case Western (a new student I think, he was presenting his old work from John Hopkins) gave me a lot of tips on who's doing what at Case Western. Sort of. Well, at least he gave me names, and that's good. Except it means more work and research for me. DAMMIT
- There was a neural networks optimization topic from Northeastern that involved proportions of excitatory and inhibitory cells. Something about the h value in the neural network to be constant... well ok I don't really know. :V
-Study at Michigan University involves Memory Maps where a cluster of cells in charge of say, one memory, may link to another memory. However, at weak stimulation one memory inhibits the activation of other memories. It actually seems pretty interesting.
-IN REGARDS TO OUR OWN WORK, most people were all like "yea cool" except for this one Blue Brain guy who totally floored us over. He pointed out specifically the parts that make our simulations slower and the clumsiness in construction of the platform. In many cases we were like "yes, we know that already you don't need to point that out *roll eyes*" in our head but of course since he's competing against us (I'm assuming since he's working on a similar project in the Blue Brain project) I think he wants to make us look bad as possible since we're already presenting what we have.
-I got a hand-exercise squishy thing that was in the shape of a cute chicken from a chicken antibody vendor. THIS IS WHAT I PAID THE 100 DOLLAR REGISTRATION FEE FOR, YOU HEAR ME??!??
-After that our super generous lab director gave us a big dinner where everyone ordered too much food and I bet half of the food we ordered were never finished. And it was all very expensive but apparently he is rich so its ok. Chicken soup was helpful considering the meals I've been having previously have had liters of oil dunked into them.
-I got back at like 11 PM super tired and ready to sleep in the air mattress that had a hole in it. :(
Monday
-Bus Miss-adventures #1: While walking towards the street I saw the bus SPEED past the bus stop and I was like "OH WAIT I NEED TO CATCH THAT" and ran after it but the bus never stopped and I just got worn out. :( Someone actually saw me and offered to catch the bus for me but I declined. People here in Chicago appear to be nice though.
-Water at the convention center: $3.75
-Banana: 1.00$
-Vendor items such as bags, candy, larger bags, and pens: Priceless. Literally.
-Sunday was an intense day, but Monday things were starting to settle down. I noticed, while wandering around, there were many simulation and modeling projects on oscillation and frequency patterns in different areas in the brain. MIT was pretty big on it.
-To my surprise there was a poster from Georgia Tech that dealt with an issue of heterogeneity in two neurons, in both simulation and in experimentation. I actually couldn't quite figure out what they were doing because I didn't exactly know what the heterogeneity meant... I think they were trying to test some theory or modeling scheme (like neural networks) and determining the constant (or nonconstant) value in such a model.
-There were some...interesting posters I happen to see when I passed by... such as "Mechanisms and Effects of Sleep Deprivation in College Students" or "Neural Activity Patterns in Older Adults after Internet Training." It's all good but I wonder how they get grants for funding this sort of research. Maybe the grant-givers were just curious.
-CONNECTOMES. Someone in the University of Utah is trying to build an Entire Connectome of the Retina , currently by hand. They're apparently taking a million images or something and piecing them together, manually, one by one. I asked them if they need a computer scientist to help them connect them faster or to help model whatever they found. I think there were amused. :V I will need to contact them later.
-Lunch was in ChinaTown (THANKFULLY) and we had some dim sum. Or rather, I had a lot of dim sum because I realized my friend didn't like to eat pork. So I had most of the dim sum. The other two people accompanying me had their fried rice and chow mien, though.
-Back at the poster session, there wasn't too much to see even though there was another modeling poster sesion. Perhaps the next most interesting thing wasStructural Synaptic Plasticity Modeling where someone was modeling how the shape of neurons change over time. I think, I could be wrong and forgot what their research actually was.
-Continuing the "I wonder how these projects get funding" trend, we have a toy neuron called "My First Neuron" for kindergartners or something! Man, kids are learning this stuff in elementary school now. That's intense.
-Since there wasn't too much other things to see other than visiting old lab coworkers, I went to the wikipedia talk where the speakers were teaching people how to use wikipedia and why everyone should use it. In actuality I kind of could figure out on how to use wikipedia but I was also sorta feeling crappy so I just sat there and listened to stuff I already knew about. I probably can't help contribute despite them saying "OMG EVERYONE CONTRIBUTE" because I don't think my knowledge is that good enough quite yet. :V
-Today was "meet everyone from your old lab" day. In the morning I went to SA's poster session and said hi. He was mostly busy all the time though. In the afternoon I was eager to meet MI since I haven't seen him for a while ever since he graduated and went to UCLA. There I bumped into MA too, so we talked a bit. Later when the poster session was almost over, I got together with MI, MA, and YU where we all decided to go out for lunch... somewhere. SA came along too. I suggested Chinatown but SA didn't want to go. Then I found MI, the old lab PI (well he's my current PI too), and so we hung out around the convention center for a longer period of time. RE came by and talked for a while too. EVENTUALLY we (me, MI, YU, and MA) figured that we'd have dinner after the social since we spent so much time talking and hanging out around the conference center that there wasn't much time left after that until the social.
-We took a bus to MA and YU's hotel. The view was really scenic and I regret that I didn't bring a camera (this thought occurred to me like 10 minutes before I landed in Chicago... "OMG I FORGOT TO BRING A CAMERA"). After stopping by MA and YU's room to drop stuff off we went to the social.
-Social was interesting. And dark. Bars are so dark. The weather was really dry so I had a slight bloody nose unfortunately (it was so dry I had to buy chapstick for my lips) but then I drank some orange juice and it was better. Sort of. I kind of felt queasy after drinking the juice but at least I didn't throw up. I met some people and learned about neurotree, which is a pretty nifty website that treats students and faculty as children and parents, and we can see who taught who and stuff like that. My name is now in there, so now you can see who my big bosses are!
-After that we went to some place called "the Bowl" or something to that extent which served Chinese and Thai food. There was this hot and sour soup that was pretty good if I wasn't feeling like crap still from all the dryness and the slight malaise that I've been having for nearly the entire conference period. We didn't order much since a lot of us were already pretty full from the social. Following that we went to CVS Pharmacy where I can buy stuff to make the dryness feel slightly less dry and then went back to the hotel, where I picked up my stuff and left.
Tuesday
-Bus Miss-adventure #2: This time I saw the bus fly by and I didn't run after it, thinking "I have enough time anyway so i'll just wait for the next bus". I was standing beside this building which helped in that it blocked off the wind, but I had to check every now and then to see if the bus was coming. I HAPPENED to NOT CHECK for a short moment whether the bus was coming and then... it just drove by the bus stop. AGAIN. WHEN I WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT, PRACTICALLY. OTL Needless to say I checked for the bus a bit more often after that and got on after the 3rd bus. :V Oh bother.
-Tuesday I didn't find too many posters relevant to my research or academic search either, but I did find funny things. Like a pigeon in the convention center! It was just walking around the tables behind the posters minding its own business, looking for leftovers. :V Or, a vendor advertising a mini-centrifuge signed by the cast of CSI Miami! The ones that do 10 minute PCRs! Signed a mini-centrifuge! :V There was also a poster on "Walking Speed Control in a Stick Insect". Really? They're measuring how a walking stick walks? :V
-There were still things that WERE relevant and worth mentioning. At UC Davis some people were designing a [b]Software tracking the movement and placement of chambers and electrodes[/b] in people's (or rodent's) brains. I believe it used scans and then determined the approximate location through the programming. They used a program called Caret (coded in C++ and OpenGL). Rather intriguing stuff.
-An intriguing poster to look at was the 3D Model Reconstruction of the Neuropil at University of Austin, Texas. The stuff they had on the poster was really detailed and thorough; it was very impressive. They even went down to the organelles and stated how they affected flow of current within the cell; that's some awesome work there. Along the lines of 3D, I think in this session I noted how many models are starting to incorporate 3 dimensions (our model uses 2) in lately, making things more complicated and making it seem like our project is a step behind (although we'll catch up soon... I think... maybe).
- There was some person who presented a poster on the "Information Integration Model of Consciousness"... It took me a while to figure out what the models meant, but when I did I didn't exactly see how it dealt with consciousness (it seems to be some sort of sorting algorithm that split a group into more groups, then separated those groups and having some sort of weight calculation). Or maybe I'm just stupid. :V
-So, Lunchtime came and I couldn't get anyone to come with me for lunch so I went to Chinatown by myself hoping to find a noodle house except... I couldn't find one. I walked, and walked, and kept on walking, turnedmyheadsuddenlybecauseIsawananimeposter then continued walking... until I found one, but it turned out to be a Pho house and I didn't really want Pho. So I walked back and went to a small cafe which luckily had noodle soup on its list. I ate some Shredded Pork and Preserved Vegetable Noodle Soup. I NEVER felt MORE satisfied about my meals in ALL THE I'VE BEEN IN CHICAGO.
- In the afternoon I went to a conference talk by Larry Swanson (I'm not affiliated with him and his name is in the programme anyway so I might as well mention his name) who also happened to come from USC. Most of his talk was on the history of Neuroscience, but it got a bit informative at the end, where he mentioned the state of neuroscience today and talked about some technologies. He mentioned how pattern recognition software is slow in development, so that's showing the importance of robot vision. Then he mentioned some neuroinformatics stuff ("Google Earth for the Brain") and talked about NIF and BAMS (I need to look up more on this since I don't know too much about it).
- After the talk I walked around the poster session along with SU. We met up with some of my old lab friends at their poster and we had some conversations and etc. After the poster session was over SU went to another talk while I went to get dinner. Because everything at the convention was so EXPENSIVE I decided to take the Metra train (they gave us FREE PASSES which only last for like 3 stops so its not THAT great), went to the end, bought a sandwich at subway somewhere, then went back and ate sandwich at the convention center.
-I FOUND MICROWAVES AT THE CONVENTION CENTER. A bit late though. It was funny because SU was eating cold leftover pizza only moments before. And only a few feet away from the microwaves too. It was quite ironic.
-The last event that happened on Tuesday was the Computational Neuroscience Social. For a social event I wasn't exactly that social, mostly hanging out with people from my current lab + 1. But I did manage to talk with that +1 on some variable step method models, crabs (its his research), eating crabs, and anime (Yes I know, I was totally productive...). I also talked with another guy because he looked bored and lonely and found out he was a master's student that, like me, was applying for graduate school looking into computational neuroscience programs. We exchanged our background projects and also talked about schools (Of course, we were all like "Yea, its ALL about UCSD for Comp. Neurosci") and I got some info on other good schools I can look into. Or schools I might not look into because it's more work. :<
-After that I went back earlie rthan before (GASP) and arrived back at my friend's place at 10 PM, where I mostly just talked about politics and Rand and her books before packing up and going to sleep.
EXTRA: Wednesday
-SO IT TURNS OUT I SPEND HALF OF MY DAY AT THE AIRPORT/ ON AN AIRLINE, and 2/3RDS OF MY DAY DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Luckily Chicago Airport is a lot nicer than LAX and there was time to wander around and explore before I laid down in the wait area to rest. Coincidentally, my current lab collegues were on the same flight so we met up and had fun there. Stuff happened and then we went on the flight and crashed-- I mean, went home. Oh before I left the LAX airport I found a vending machine selling iPhones. Really? Is there really some guy who's gonna be like "YEA I NEED ANIPHONE RIGHT NOW EVEN THOUGH I WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO CALL ANYONE OR LISTEN TO MUSIC ON IT"?
-I got home, played some RO, watched some Shugo Chara, and basically killed any sense of maturity and smartness I managed to get while I was at the neuroscience conference.
All in all, good fun. I enjoyed it despite being only 9/10ths as healthy as I wanted to be at the convention. CAN'T WAIT FOR NEXT YEAR ITS IN SAN DIEGO, RIGHT NEXT TO WHERE I'M LIVING--Oh wait I might be at the east coast then. ...DAMMMIT
For privacy purposes only the first two letters of a person's first name is used. I'm the one who knows who they all are anyway. :D
Friday
-Having baggage apparently costs 20 dollars and I accidentally selected that I wanted Premier stuff or whatever (which was another 38 dollars) so I managed to waste over 50 dollars before I even headed off to Chicago. This trip sounded awesome already!
-Noted that while quality of food in United Airlines might be a bit better than China Eastern, the flight attendants in the former are significantly older than that of the latter. Also, possibly associated with age, they are REALLY SLOW at handing out drinks. That, and the food/snacks cost money too.
-Arrived at the O'Hare airport, found out that the airport was conveniently located 2 hours away from where my friend's house is (and where I was staying). And also that she didn't have a car so we had to take train/bus all the way back. Upon arrival, stuff was dropped off, a meal was eaten at a local restaurant, and fatigue was prompting us to sleep as soon as we were done.
Saturday
-Originally there were very little plans for Saturday since there weren't any poster sessions of my interest but it ended up to be a busy day
-After figuring out how to get to the convention center in the most roundabout way I checked in and received the programme.
-Hueg programme is HUEG. Imagine the anime expo programme. Now imagine a book of it multiplied by 3. There were 7 books all around that average size as the programme for Neuroscience 2009. Safe to say I was not amused lugging 7 books around the entire day.
-Went out to eat lunch with CA, a high school acquaintance. It's interesting to meet people after 5 years and see where they are now. Apparently in graduate school, which is where I'm going too. Also, apparently married. Which does not seem to be quite where I'm going right now...We talked about our works and Los Angeles and Chicago and other stuff. I learned there is a such thing as computational linguistics and they almost do the same thing as I do. Looks like I can get into any field with computational simulations!
-I went back to the conference to check out one of the posters from my lab. There I met SE, one of the big guys from the company sponsoring our research. We shook hands and he told me about the situation of the company, and how many pharmaceutical companies are interested in our stuff. It's all business. And it's alllll right. (the state of our research and the future of the company, that is)
-Found a poster shortly after about A new, incredibly accurate algorithm for determining error around edges in images, something interesting for computer vision. Admittedly I felt stupid because I couldn't quite know exactly how the algorithm worked, but it had to do something with partitioning one image, then partitioning the same image in another way, then comparing the two images... I think. Regardless it was remarkably accurate; for example, an image that might have more miscounts due to noise might have an accurate "edge" of an image, but an image that has less miscounts yet has a specific miscount next to the edge might seem more accurate overall, but is actually more inaccurate because now the edge looks like it has some kind of bump. This algorithm corrects for this kind of thing. Dr. TU, who was in charge of this project, also referred me to some other people from his school doing some computational neuroscience work, and I'm thankful for that.
-After that I went to visit my old advisor, RE, at a bar. AL and her boyfriend came and visited also. Eventually, SA, one of RE's new lab coworkers, and the person letting me crash at her place, PH, all joined to hang out. We hung out and talked about lab research, lab drama, football, stuff that doesn't work in lab and makes us angry, more football, other sports, where to eat, what to eat, finding a place to wait for our pizza to be cooked, what we wanted to drink at starbucks, japanese hair color, and traps. And yes I was amazed we somehow got onto the topic of traps.
-Eventually our Deep Dish Pizza was ready and, even if it looked small, it was a BIG thing. Even with like 6 people we could not finish it, so I was allowed to take it back to my friend's place. The leftover pizza was to be my breakfast for the next 4 days.
Sunday
-Lots of stuff happened on this day, since Neuroinformatics poster session was in the morning and Simulations was in the afternoon.
-There were a lot of graph-theory related research in the morning too (Seperate from Neuroinformatics). In one type of research "Fault Diagnosis Engineering", they try to determine protein network interaction to determine what kind of treatment is appropriate.
-Another network project involved an attempt to map post-translational proteins from different sections (synapse, cytosol, nucleus). They mostly looked into proteins that get phosphorylated right after translation, I think, and used a pulldown assay for that. They also did some stuff with histones.
-There was some research on Neurodegenerative Networks at Northwestern University. Seems to emphasize how many neurodegenerative diseases and cancer seem to have common networks to go by. Quite interesting.
-The Salk Institute is trying to make a 2-in-1 MRI and EEG machine!
-Some very enthusiastic person explained his research to me in using vectors to determine flow rate in the Perforant and Hippocampal areas of the brain. Honestly while I was listening I was like "this is all good and interesting but how will this ever be useful". I think maybe it will be useful to determine how drugs will flow into the system... or maybe the flow has something to do with how memory or other parts of the brain work? ...Ok yea I'm still not too sure what's its usefulness is right now.
-So along to ACTUAL NEUROINFORMATICS STUFF, there's various programs and interesting development going on. A lot of database stuff (of course). In one poster they're trying to form a database connecting symptoms of diseases in humans with animal models, since that may not always be very obvious when you're ordering your Alzheimer-diseased mouse.
-Apparently there was this poster on some program "GENMA" from the universeity of British Columbia but I'm googling it and nothing is coming up. I'm sad. :(
-The National Taiwan University is making a database of MRI images.
-There was this one computer science person who was making a list of words that are mentioned in science articles, then grouping them all together. I think this is like saying the word "hippocampus" is usually closely associated with the word "memory" in journal articles, or something to that extent. IMO I could not determine what exactly was the difference between what he was trying to do, and what a search engine does already at pubMed.
-Slim-Prim at University of Tennessee- https://ctsi.utmem.edu/gateway.php I think it tries to connect clinical data with research data.
-Neuroscience Information Framework BIIIIG neuroscience website that's acting like Neuroscience wikipedia + Neuroscience google. Heck, it IS Neuroscience Google. Seems like people from UCSD and Caltech are working on it.
-Waxholm Space and the INCF Digital Atlasing Program- making a world map of the Rat Brain. Many people, including UCSD (again!) are involved in this.
-After the Neuroinformatics poster session I found SU, my coworker, at a seminar. The seminar was pretty boring unfortunately; she and her friend RO were falling asleep. It had to do something with determining whether the X and Y chromosomes themselves determined gender identity, or if a particular gene which encodes for the generation of testosterone or some other hormones determined it.
-We set up our own poster afterwards. SU had to stay by her poster so I had to go get lunch by myself. I had a McDonalds hamburger which, later on, I thought was a bad idea since I had malaise almost the entire day afterwards and for the next 2 days at the convention center. Well, I don't directly associate it with the McDonalds hamburger but it sucks that I was at not quite the best condition to run around and learn neuroscience from everyone.
-There were some interesting topics in the simulation poster session #1. The first thing that caught my eye was a project some people were doing in Japan on connecting various different simulation and modeling programs together to make one larger system. Considering how we were trying to get Java to work with C, and then python, I (and my lab coworkers) became REALLY INTERESTED in where this work is going to go.
-A really overly happy but friendly guy from Case Western (a new student I think, he was presenting his old work from John Hopkins) gave me a lot of tips on who's doing what at Case Western. Sort of. Well, at least he gave me names, and that's good. Except it means more work and research for me. DAMMIT
- There was a neural networks optimization topic from Northeastern that involved proportions of excitatory and inhibitory cells. Something about the h value in the neural network to be constant... well ok I don't really know. :V
-Study at Michigan University involves Memory Maps where a cluster of cells in charge of say, one memory, may link to another memory. However, at weak stimulation one memory inhibits the activation of other memories. It actually seems pretty interesting.
-IN REGARDS TO OUR OWN WORK, most people were all like "yea cool" except for this one Blue Brain guy who totally floored us over. He pointed out specifically the parts that make our simulations slower and the clumsiness in construction of the platform. In many cases we were like "yes, we know that already you don't need to point that out *roll eyes*" in our head but of course since he's competing against us (I'm assuming since he's working on a similar project in the Blue Brain project) I think he wants to make us look bad as possible since we're already presenting what we have.
-I got a hand-exercise squishy thing that was in the shape of a cute chicken from a chicken antibody vendor. THIS IS WHAT I PAID THE 100 DOLLAR REGISTRATION FEE FOR, YOU HEAR ME??!??
-After that our super generous lab director gave us a big dinner where everyone ordered too much food and I bet half of the food we ordered were never finished. And it was all very expensive but apparently he is rich so its ok. Chicken soup was helpful considering the meals I've been having previously have had liters of oil dunked into them.
-I got back at like 11 PM super tired and ready to sleep in the air mattress that had a hole in it. :(
Monday
-Bus Miss-adventures #1: While walking towards the street I saw the bus SPEED past the bus stop and I was like "OH WAIT I NEED TO CATCH THAT" and ran after it but the bus never stopped and I just got worn out. :( Someone actually saw me and offered to catch the bus for me but I declined. People here in Chicago appear to be nice though.
-Water at the convention center: $3.75
-Banana: 1.00$
-Vendor items such as bags, candy, larger bags, and pens: Priceless. Literally.
-Sunday was an intense day, but Monday things were starting to settle down. I noticed, while wandering around, there were many simulation and modeling projects on oscillation and frequency patterns in different areas in the brain. MIT was pretty big on it.
-To my surprise there was a poster from Georgia Tech that dealt with an issue of heterogeneity in two neurons, in both simulation and in experimentation. I actually couldn't quite figure out what they were doing because I didn't exactly know what the heterogeneity meant... I think they were trying to test some theory or modeling scheme (like neural networks) and determining the constant (or nonconstant) value in such a model.
-There were some...interesting posters I happen to see when I passed by... such as "Mechanisms and Effects of Sleep Deprivation in College Students" or "Neural Activity Patterns in Older Adults after Internet Training." It's all good but I wonder how they get grants for funding this sort of research. Maybe the grant-givers were just curious.
-CONNECTOMES. Someone in the University of Utah is trying to build an Entire Connectome of the Retina , currently by hand. They're apparently taking a million images or something and piecing them together, manually, one by one. I asked them if they need a computer scientist to help them connect them faster or to help model whatever they found. I think there were amused. :V I will need to contact them later.
-Lunch was in ChinaTown (THANKFULLY) and we had some dim sum. Or rather, I had a lot of dim sum because I realized my friend didn't like to eat pork. So I had most of the dim sum. The other two people accompanying me had their fried rice and chow mien, though.
-Back at the poster session, there wasn't too much to see even though there was another modeling poster sesion. Perhaps the next most interesting thing wasStructural Synaptic Plasticity Modeling where someone was modeling how the shape of neurons change over time. I think, I could be wrong and forgot what their research actually was.
-Continuing the "I wonder how these projects get funding" trend, we have a toy neuron called "My First Neuron" for kindergartners or something! Man, kids are learning this stuff in elementary school now. That's intense.
-Since there wasn't too much other things to see other than visiting old lab coworkers, I went to the wikipedia talk where the speakers were teaching people how to use wikipedia and why everyone should use it. In actuality I kind of could figure out on how to use wikipedia but I was also sorta feeling crappy so I just sat there and listened to stuff I already knew about. I probably can't help contribute despite them saying "OMG EVERYONE CONTRIBUTE" because I don't think my knowledge is that good enough quite yet. :V
-Today was "meet everyone from your old lab" day. In the morning I went to SA's poster session and said hi. He was mostly busy all the time though. In the afternoon I was eager to meet MI since I haven't seen him for a while ever since he graduated and went to UCLA. There I bumped into MA too, so we talked a bit. Later when the poster session was almost over, I got together with MI, MA, and YU where we all decided to go out for lunch... somewhere. SA came along too. I suggested Chinatown but SA didn't want to go. Then I found MI, the old lab PI (well he's my current PI too), and so we hung out around the convention center for a longer period of time. RE came by and talked for a while too. EVENTUALLY we (me, MI, YU, and MA) figured that we'd have dinner after the social since we spent so much time talking and hanging out around the conference center that there wasn't much time left after that until the social.
-We took a bus to MA and YU's hotel. The view was really scenic and I regret that I didn't bring a camera (this thought occurred to me like 10 minutes before I landed in Chicago... "OMG I FORGOT TO BRING A CAMERA"). After stopping by MA and YU's room to drop stuff off we went to the social.
-Social was interesting. And dark. Bars are so dark. The weather was really dry so I had a slight bloody nose unfortunately (it was so dry I had to buy chapstick for my lips) but then I drank some orange juice and it was better. Sort of. I kind of felt queasy after drinking the juice but at least I didn't throw up. I met some people and learned about neurotree, which is a pretty nifty website that treats students and faculty as children and parents, and we can see who taught who and stuff like that. My name is now in there, so now you can see who my big bosses are!
-After that we went to some place called "the Bowl" or something to that extent which served Chinese and Thai food. There was this hot and sour soup that was pretty good if I wasn't feeling like crap still from all the dryness and the slight malaise that I've been having for nearly the entire conference period. We didn't order much since a lot of us were already pretty full from the social. Following that we went to CVS Pharmacy where I can buy stuff to make the dryness feel slightly less dry and then went back to the hotel, where I picked up my stuff and left.
Tuesday
-Bus Miss-adventure #2: This time I saw the bus fly by and I didn't run after it, thinking "I have enough time anyway so i'll just wait for the next bus". I was standing beside this building which helped in that it blocked off the wind, but I had to check every now and then to see if the bus was coming. I HAPPENED to NOT CHECK for a short moment whether the bus was coming and then... it just drove by the bus stop. AGAIN. WHEN I WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT, PRACTICALLY. OTL Needless to say I checked for the bus a bit more often after that and got on after the 3rd bus. :V Oh bother.
-Tuesday I didn't find too many posters relevant to my research or academic search either, but I did find funny things. Like a pigeon in the convention center! It was just walking around the tables behind the posters minding its own business, looking for leftovers. :V Or, a vendor advertising a mini-centrifuge signed by the cast of CSI Miami! The ones that do 10 minute PCRs! Signed a mini-centrifuge! :V There was also a poster on "Walking Speed Control in a Stick Insect". Really? They're measuring how a walking stick walks? :V
-There were still things that WERE relevant and worth mentioning. At UC Davis some people were designing a [b]Software tracking the movement and placement of chambers and electrodes[/b] in people's (or rodent's) brains. I believe it used scans and then determined the approximate location through the programming. They used a program called Caret (coded in C++ and OpenGL). Rather intriguing stuff.
-An intriguing poster to look at was the 3D Model Reconstruction of the Neuropil at University of Austin, Texas. The stuff they had on the poster was really detailed and thorough; it was very impressive. They even went down to the organelles and stated how they affected flow of current within the cell; that's some awesome work there. Along the lines of 3D, I think in this session I noted how many models are starting to incorporate 3 dimensions (our model uses 2) in lately, making things more complicated and making it seem like our project is a step behind (although we'll catch up soon... I think... maybe).
- There was some person who presented a poster on the "Information Integration Model of Consciousness"... It took me a while to figure out what the models meant, but when I did I didn't exactly see how it dealt with consciousness (it seems to be some sort of sorting algorithm that split a group into more groups, then separated those groups and having some sort of weight calculation). Or maybe I'm just stupid. :V
-So, Lunchtime came and I couldn't get anyone to come with me for lunch so I went to Chinatown by myself hoping to find a noodle house except... I couldn't find one. I walked, and walked, and kept on walking, turnedmyheadsuddenlybecauseIsawananimeposter then continued walking... until I found one, but it turned out to be a Pho house and I didn't really want Pho. So I walked back and went to a small cafe which luckily had noodle soup on its list. I ate some Shredded Pork and Preserved Vegetable Noodle Soup. I NEVER felt MORE satisfied about my meals in ALL THE I'VE BEEN IN CHICAGO.
- In the afternoon I went to a conference talk by Larry Swanson (I'm not affiliated with him and his name is in the programme anyway so I might as well mention his name) who also happened to come from USC. Most of his talk was on the history of Neuroscience, but it got a bit informative at the end, where he mentioned the state of neuroscience today and talked about some technologies. He mentioned how pattern recognition software is slow in development, so that's showing the importance of robot vision. Then he mentioned some neuroinformatics stuff ("Google Earth for the Brain") and talked about NIF and BAMS (I need to look up more on this since I don't know too much about it).
- After the talk I walked around the poster session along with SU. We met up with some of my old lab friends at their poster and we had some conversations and etc. After the poster session was over SU went to another talk while I went to get dinner. Because everything at the convention was so EXPENSIVE I decided to take the Metra train (they gave us FREE PASSES which only last for like 3 stops so its not THAT great), went to the end, bought a sandwich at subway somewhere, then went back and ate sandwich at the convention center.
-I FOUND MICROWAVES AT THE CONVENTION CENTER. A bit late though. It was funny because SU was eating cold leftover pizza only moments before. And only a few feet away from the microwaves too. It was quite ironic.
-The last event that happened on Tuesday was the Computational Neuroscience Social. For a social event I wasn't exactly that social, mostly hanging out with people from my current lab + 1. But I did manage to talk with that +1 on some variable step method models, crabs (its his research), eating crabs, and anime (Yes I know, I was totally productive...). I also talked with another guy because he looked bored and lonely and found out he was a master's student that, like me, was applying for graduate school looking into computational neuroscience programs. We exchanged our background projects and also talked about schools (Of course, we were all like "Yea, its ALL about UCSD for Comp. Neurosci") and I got some info on other good schools I can look into. Or schools I might not look into because it's more work. :<
-After that I went back earlie rthan before (GASP) and arrived back at my friend's place at 10 PM, where I mostly just talked about politics and Rand and her books before packing up and going to sleep.
EXTRA: Wednesday
-SO IT TURNS OUT I SPEND HALF OF MY DAY AT THE AIRPORT/ ON AN AIRLINE, and 2/3RDS OF MY DAY DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Luckily Chicago Airport is a lot nicer than LAX and there was time to wander around and explore before I laid down in the wait area to rest. Coincidentally, my current lab collegues were on the same flight so we met up and had fun there. Stuff happened and then we went on the flight and crashed-- I mean, went home. Oh before I left the LAX airport I found a vending machine selling iPhones. Really? Is there really some guy who's gonna be like "YEA I NEED AN
-I got home, played some RO, watched some Shugo Chara, and basically killed any sense of maturity and smartness I managed to get while I was at the neuroscience conference.
All in all, good fun. I enjoyed it despite being only 9/10ths as healthy as I wanted to be at the convention. CAN'T WAIT FOR NEXT YEAR ITS IN SAN DIEGO, RIGHT NEXT TO WHERE I'M LIVING--Oh wait I might be at the east coast then. ...DAMMMIT
10.10.09
8.10.09
Belvedia
Obligatory GUMI wall.
This is with glowy everything. Anyone have an opinion if there should be no-glow on anything? like the lacing? Or the words "Megpoid GUMI"?
tell me over IM or something! :V
Obligatory Haruhi Announcement
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-10-08/disappearance-of-haruhi-suzumiya-film-announced-for-2010
yea nothing really special here.
yea nothing really special here.
6.10.09
Apartment Internets
The nametag for this xkcd is absolutely true.
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5899230
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5899230
5.10.09
Ig Nobel Awards
Ah the world, and the research they do.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1002/2?rss=1
My favorite comment so far is from here:
"And I have a great idea about selling emergency protective undergarments in Japan, but the exact details don't really belong in this forum..."
I can certainly see where he's coming from. Catering to Moe culture I'm presuming!
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1002/2?rss=1
My favorite comment so far is from here:
"And I have a great idea about selling emergency protective undergarments in Japan, but the exact details don't really belong in this forum..."
I can certainly see where he's coming from. Catering to Moe culture I'm presuming!
4.10.09
Sora Wo Kakeru Shojo
The problem with shows like these is when I watch them I never want to stop, but when I stop watching for a while I never want to watch them again because I'll know I'd never want to stop.
IN ANY CASE, the series is quite significant in that it was the first (I think?) series where I didn't watch for any character in particular, because I didn't really find an attraction to any significant character (Moe-standpointwise). I would have to say if I had to choose Akiha... because of the pink hair. :V
So the question comes to being, why did I enjoy the series so much? Well, good plot, artwork, and animation helped. In fact I was quite surprised at how much I immensely enjoyed the artwork to SoraKake yet cannot pinpoint a particular moe character that I would gush about. Still, for the pilot suits, GOOD JOB! :V (I feel so bad saying that) I think part of the reason I enjoyed the artwork a lot was because the last show I watched when I started this series (Was it Asu no Yoichi? I forgot) did not exactly have the prettiest artwork, and when I switched over I was like "BEAUTIFUL!!!" The fight scenes were pretty exciting too. Well, as exciting as sticks with the most random of weapons can get, at least.
In terms of characters, I liked a couple of them for personality, although none of them are anything to gush about. For personality I think Honoka was the coolest character, because I believe if I were to model anything off of Ruby I'd probably have her be the model. Other characters were interesting and funny. What's probably most surprising in my opinion is that, as the show started to get to an end, I thought Nerval was actually a pretty cool person. His reasonings, if you thought them through, were fairly logical, though his methods were not exactly the most friendly. And, he puts people in happy boxes! He just wants to make a world where everyone is happy. In boxes. :V THEY'RE BOXES!!! WHAT'S WRONG WITH THEM, is what he's trying to say. :(
But yea his methods weren't exactly the most "humane" so I guess that's why everyone didn't like him.
The music is quite dramatic and adrenaline rushing, which is suited for a series that is using sticks with stuff attached to them as their main fighters. Oh, and some planes, but those are insignificant. And a big cannon. :V
"With Pleasure!"
...Oh Leopard. :V
EDIT: Oh yea, one qualm I had about the series (like many series, actually) is the incompleteness of some parts of the plot. The plot of this series moved fast, was suspenseful and unpredictable, however there were some parts that were inconsistent... like what about that note on "Enigma"? The shop just gets blown up and that's it? :( I was curious to know what that note was!
And actually not really making anyone "die" makes this series a pretty happy series but, I think it would have worked better if they kept things consistent like that, too. :V
IN ANY CASE, the series is quite significant in that it was the first (I think?) series where I didn't watch for any character in particular, because I didn't really find an attraction to any significant character (Moe-standpointwise). I would have to say if I had to choose Akiha... because of the pink hair. :V
So the question comes to being, why did I enjoy the series so much? Well, good plot, artwork, and animation helped. In fact I was quite surprised at how much I immensely enjoyed the artwork to SoraKake yet cannot pinpoint a particular moe character that I would gush about. Still, for the pilot suits, GOOD JOB! :V (I feel so bad saying that) I think part of the reason I enjoyed the artwork a lot was because the last show I watched when I started this series (Was it Asu no Yoichi? I forgot) did not exactly have the prettiest artwork, and when I switched over I was like "BEAUTIFUL!!!" The fight scenes were pretty exciting too. Well, as exciting as sticks with the most random of weapons can get, at least.
In terms of characters, I liked a couple of them for personality, although none of them are anything to gush about. For personality I think Honoka was the coolest character, because I believe if I were to model anything off of Ruby I'd probably have her be the model. Other characters were interesting and funny. What's probably most surprising in my opinion is that, as the show started to get to an end, I thought Nerval was actually a pretty cool person. His reasonings, if you thought them through, were fairly logical, though his methods were not exactly the most friendly. And, he puts people in happy boxes! He just wants to make a world where everyone is happy. In boxes. :V THEY'RE BOXES!!! WHAT'S WRONG WITH THEM, is what he's trying to say. :(
But yea his methods weren't exactly the most "humane" so I guess that's why everyone didn't like him.
The music is quite dramatic and adrenaline rushing, which is suited for a series that is using sticks with stuff attached to them as their main fighters. Oh, and some planes, but those are insignificant. And a big cannon. :V
"With Pleasure!"
...Oh Leopard. :V
EDIT: Oh yea, one qualm I had about the series (like many series, actually) is the incompleteness of some parts of the plot. The plot of this series moved fast, was suspenseful and unpredictable, however there were some parts that were inconsistent... like what about that note on "Enigma"? The shop just gets blown up and that's it? :( I was curious to know what that note was!
And actually not really making anyone "die" makes this series a pretty happy series but, I think it would have worked better if they kept things consistent like that, too. :V
:(
Goddammit Crunchyroll, why must you make my life hard!
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-10-02/crunchyroll-adds-miracle-train-nogizaka-haruka-no-himitsu-2
Killing fandoms on both sides by licensing them on your streaming site! :( Sigh Tokyotosho is my only hope.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-10-02/crunchyroll-adds-miracle-train-nogizaka-haruka-no-himitsu-2
Killing fandoms on both sides by licensing them on your streaming site! :( Sigh Tokyotosho is my only hope.
1.10.09
GakuGumi Comic Thingy
A SCANLATION BY G4oPTG!! Good luck figuring out what that means.
Because a lot of people don't seem to know (the translator and a friend of mine who QTed it didn't know) Gacktpoid and Megupoid are made from the same company, but a company different from the common vocaloids (Miku, Len/Rin, Luka). This is also sort of why Gumi is less popular than the other four... :(
Hopefully the explanation will make the story a bit more understandable, from where they're coming from.
EDIT: FOR WHATEVER REASON THE IMAGE ISN'T COMING OUT FULL SIZE SO ITS CRAPPY so I need to figure out what to do with this.
EDIT: Actual size: http://www.nethila.com/akuun/TReusbucks/sister.jpg
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