31.1.10

Miku Spree

Not a lot of (good) GUMI videos have been coming out lately, so I've been cheating on her watching some Miku videos instead. I'll list here a few I liked. (Or rather here is the list of songs people did karaoke on NicoNico on save the first one, since that's a good classification of whether a song got popular or not. I'm not shifting through 3 million mediocre Miku videos just to find the ones that I like)

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/1264787550 << Piano Girl

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm6666016 << "Romeo and Cinderella"...? Is that the title? ...or is it... TSUNDERELLA???... ok I think its Cinderella, too much "Otome wa boku ni koishiteru" for me...

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8619805 << Chain Girl

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm8139134 << Puzzle

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm5524166 << "初めての恋が終わる時" I'm not translating that. This is another one of supercell's works, albeit not as good as some of their other works, imo. Moetron has a translation of this song somewhere on their website, if I can remember.

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/nm6971638 << 1/6. Not too bad, but not as good as the other songs I've heard above either.

EDIT: I THINK ITS IMPORTANT TO NOTE (ok not really, I'm just justifying my Miku spree) that most of these songs are good alone, with Miku not being necessarily the best vocalist for them. In some cases, a human singer or even GUMI would be better.

Bad Apple on CNN

The world is getting smaller.

http://www.moetron.com/2010/01/30/bad-apple-featured-on-cnn/

30.1.10

K-On 2nd Season--is not what I want to talk about

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-01-29/k-on-2nd-season-b-gata-h-kei-anime-dated-for-april

Look its K-On Second Season this April

Does something seem out of place in the description of a new anime in the second paragraph? Something along the lines of "virgin", "100", and "partners"...? :V

White Album

I don't get why lovers need to lie to each other. :V

Well that aside I think the general trend in all these anime is to make the girl(s) as pure as possible, but because they have to balance it out (after all, a human only has a limited amount of good and bad) they put all the possible impurities into the male characters. Well I don't think this is that bad of an anime, especially since its sources come from a rather old game. Its just rather disappointing to see a male character that seemed decent at first reveal himself to be rather weak as time goes on.

I think this might have to do with the issue of anime adaptions of visual novels, and them trying to go through everyone's path making the guy look like a terrible person. But then again they might be doing this on purpose... :V

Honestly the show confused me a lot for a good amount of the series. I was always like "Why is he doing this?" or "Why is she doing this"? The one thing this show does a lot better than a lot of other drama/romance like shows I've watched is that it keeps me watching, mainly because I'm constantly asking these questions. I'm wondering about the behavior, the rational meaning behind the way the characters act. Perhaps there isn't, and perhaps this is exactly what the writers want. Still, its quite bothersome. I'm always thinking "What's the underlying meaning behind this person doing that?" Aside from the main character, I always am thinking some characters have a secret motive. Especially the manager, I can't help but think she's not just doing this to tease the protagonist like the idiot that he is. I think watching it through I kind of feel that, she does support the relationship with him and Yuki in her own way (kind of like pretty much everyone else in the entire show), that 1. She really does want to protect Yuki from scandals 2. She is doing what she's doing to keep the boy "preoccupied from waiting" << Is what I want to say until I watched episode 25 :V

After thinking it over I think she just really, really likes Yuki and wants Yuki to like her back. This is the only conclusion I can get when she admits her loss and says the things she did only pushed the one she loved away from her. It also made her conclude that the boy is a terrible player and everything she did to make the protagonist seperate from Yuki, only made herself become seperated instead.

I think this is the conclusion she was getting at. I could be wrong, because the whole presentation done with White Album in general is just so unclear sometimes (the issue with the manager being the most unclear). I think in the end the manager just proves to the audience how weak the protagonist is. :V Wanting attention, using the whole "I don't really love you but I'll do everything else to you anyway, even what lovers are supposed to do" to almost everyone else. I think this anime really makes me confused as to what their idea of "love" really is.

NEVERMIND I WATCHED EPISODE 26 I KNOW WHO SHE IS IN LOVE WITH NOW HAHA I'M AN IDIOT

And why she was so devoted to Yuki! :V

(Yes I'm writing this post as I'm watching the episodes)

SO HIM THROWING AWAY THE ROCK-MEDAL IS LIKE HIM THROWING AWAY FEELINGS THAT THE GIRLS GIVE HIM, INSTEAD OF (like his father told him) TELLING THE GIRLS DIRECTLY THAT HE DOESN'T WANT THEM.

His true jerk-ness is revealed.

Wait he's been a jerk just because he threw away a rock that a childhood friend gave him a long time ago? WELL, this is anime, so I guess that happens...

Oh well it wasn't too bad. I just didn't like how the protagonist turned out. V:

29.1.10

Angel Vocaloids

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm9490064

UNDOUBTEDLY THE BEST YUKI (and Miki) VIDEO OUT SO FAR


...sorry no Gumi :( ;o;

(unnecessary) EDIT: THIS IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTEEEEEEEEEEEEE

27.1.10

Next Greatest Field in Bioinformatics

...is reading science papers. No, seriously, I need this.
(Source from Nature News, don't own, etc.)
=====

Literature mining: Speed reading

Scientists are struggling to make sense of the expanding scientific literature. Corie Lok asks whether computational tools can do the hard work for them.

n 2002, when he began to make the transition from basic cell biology to research into Alzheimer's disease, Virgil Muresan found himself all but overwhelmed by the sheer volume of literature on the disease. He and his wife, Zoia, both now at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, were hoping to test an idea that they had developed about the formation of the protein plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. But, as newcomers to the field, they were finding it almost impossible to figure out whether their hypothesis was consistent with existing publications.

"It's really difficult to be up to date with so much being published," says Virgil Muresan. And it's a challenge that is increasingly facing researchers in every field. The 19 million citations and abstracts covered by the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed search engine include nearly 830,000 articles published in 2009, up from some 814,000 in 2008 and around 772,000 in 2007. That growth rate shows no signs of abating, especially as emerging countries such as China and Brazil continue to ratchet up their research.

The Muresans, however, were able to make use of Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine (SWAN), one of a new generation of online tools designed to help researchers zero in on the papers most relevant to their interests, uncover connections and gaps that might not otherwise be obvious, and test and generate new hypotheses.

"If you think about how much effort and money we put into just Alzheimer's disease research, it is surprising that people don't put more effort into harvesting the published knowledge," says Elizabeth Wu, SWAN's project manager.

SWAN attempts to help researchers harvest that knowledge by providing a curated, browseable online repository of hypotheses in Alzheimer's disease research. The hypothesis that the Muresans put into SWAN, for example, was that plaque formation begins when amyloid-β, the major component of brain plaques, forms seeds in the terminal regions of cells in the brainstem that then nucleate the plaques in the other parts of the brain into which the terminals reach. SWAN provides a visual, colour-coded display of the relationships between the hypotheses, as derived from the published literature, and shows where they may agree or conflict.

The connections revealed by SWAN led the Muresans to new mouse-model experiments designed to strengthen their hypothesis. "SWAN has advanced our research, and focused it in a certain direction but also broadened it to other directions," says Virgil Muresan.

The use of computers to help researchers drink from the literature firehose dates back to the early 1960s and the first experiments with techniques such as keyword searching. More recent efforts include the striking 'maps of science' that cluster papers together on the basis of how often they cite one another, or by similarities in the frequencies of certain keywords.

As fascinating as these maps can be, however, they don't get at the semantics of the papers — the fact that they are talking about specific entities such as genes and proteins, and making assertions about those entities (such as gene X regulates gene Y). The extraction of this kind of information is much harder to automate, because computers are notoriously poor at understanding what they are reading. Even so, informaticians and biologists are working together more and making considerable progress, says Maryann Martone, the chairwoman of the Society for Neuroscience's neuroinformatics committee. Recently, a number of companies and academic researchers have begun to create tools that are useful for scientists, using various mixtures of automated analysis and manual curation (see Table 1, 'Power tools').

Deeper meaning

The goal of these tools is to help researchers analyse and integrate the literature more efficiently than they can do through their own reading, to hone in on the most fruitful experiments to do and to make new predictions of gene functions, say, or drug side effects.

The first step towards that goal is for the text- or semantic-mining tool to recognize key terms, or entities, such as genes and proteins. For example, academic publisher Elsevier, headquartered in Amsterdam, has piloted Reflect in two recent online issues of its journal Cell. The technology was developed at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and won Elsevier's Grand Challenge 2009 competition for new tools that improve the communication and use of scientific information.

Reflect automatically recognizes and highlights the names of genes, proteins and small molecules in the Cell articles. Users clicking on a highlighted term will see a pop-up box containing information related to that term, such as sequence data and molecular structures, along with links to the sources of the data. Reflect obtains this information from its dictionary of millions of proteins and small molecules.

Such 'entity recognition' can be done fairly accurately by many mining tools today. But other tools take on the tougher challenge of recognizing relationships between the entities. Researchers from Leiden University and Erasmus University in Rotterdam, both in the Netherlands, have developed software called Peregrine, and used it to predict an undocumented interaction between two proteins: calpain 3, which when mutated causes a type of muscular dystrophy, and parvalbumin B, which is found mainly in skeletal muscle. Their analysis found that these proteins frequently co-occurred in the literature with other key terms. Experiments then validated that the two proteins do indeed physically interact (H. H. van Haagen et al. PLoS One 4, e7894; 2009).

Development role

At the University of Colorado in Denver, bioinformatician Lawrence Hunter and his research group have developed a tool called the Hanalyzer (short for 'high-throughput analyser'), and have used it to predict the role of four genes in mouse craniofacial development. They gathered gene-expression data from three facial tissues in developing mice and generated a 'data network' showing which genes were active together at what stage of development, and in which tissues. The team also mined relevant abstracts and molecular databases for information about those genes and used this to create a 'knowledge network'.

Using both networks, the researchers homed in on a group of 20 genes that were upregulated at the same time, first in the mandible (lower jaw area) and then, about 36 hours later, in the maxilla (upper jaw). A closer look at the knowledge network suggested that these genes were involved in tongue development, because the tongue is the largest muscle group in the head and is in the mandible. Further analysis led them to four other genes that had not been previously linked to craniofacial muscle development but that were active in the same area at the same time. Subsequent experiments confirmed that these genes were also involved in tongue development (S. M. Leach et al. PLoS Comput. Biol. 5, e1000215; 2009).

“Somebody staring at the data or using existing tools would never come up with this hypothesis.”

Lawrence Hunter

"I don't see that there is any way that somebody staring at the data or using existing tools would have ever come up with this hypothesis," says Hunter.

Although extracting entities and the relationships between them is a common approach for literature-mining tools, it is not enough to pull out the full meaning of research papers, says Anita de Waard, a researcher of disruptive technologies at Elsevier Labs in Amsterdam. Scientific articles typically lay out a set of core claims, together with the empirical evidence that supports them, and then use those claims to argue for a conclusion or hypothesis. "Generally that's where the real, interesting science is," de Waard says.

Capturing the higher-level argument is an even more difficult task for a computer, but a small number of groups, such as the SWAN group, are trying to do so.

The SWAN website, which opened to the public in May 2009, was developed by two Boston-based groups, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Alzheimer Research Forum, a community and news website for Alzheimer's researchers. For each hypothesis in the system, SWAN shows the factual claims that support it, plus links to the papers supporting each claim. Because claims from the various hypotheses are linked together in a network, a user can browse from one to the next and see the connections between them. The visualization tool uses a red icon to show when two claims conflict and a green icon to show when they're consistent, allowing the user to see at a glance which hypotheses are controversial and which are well supported by the literature (see graphics, above).

At the moment, this information is unlikely to surprise experts in Alzheimer's disease. In its current stage of development, SWAN may be more useful for newcomers trying to get up to speed on the subject. Beneficiaries could include more established scientists such as the Muresans who want to move into a different field, or researchers with a pharmaceutical or biotech company who have just been put on an Alzheimer's disease project.

Building up

SWAN also has scalability issues. The vast majority of the hypotheses, claims and literature links in SWAN have been annotated and entered by the site's curator, Gwen Wong, with the help of authors. This curation is a painstaking process that has so far produced only 1,933 claims and 47 fully annotated hypotheses. But the intent is for these early hand-curation efforts to set a 'gold standard' for how the SWAN knowledge base should be built by the community as a whole. The SWAN developers plan to improve the user interface to encourage scientists to submit their own hypotheses, post comments and even do some of the curation themselves.

The need for some level of manual curation is common to the various literature tools, and limits their scalability. The SWAN team is working to automate parts of the curation process, such as extracting gene names. Elsewhere, de Waard and other researchers are investigating ways of automatically recognizing hypotheses — for example, by looking for specific word patterns.

For most of these tools, however, curation is unlikely to become fully automated. "Literature mining is hard to do in a way that is both high scale and high accuracy," says John Wilbanks, director of Science Commons, a data-sharing initiative in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Developers say a more likely solution, at least in the short term, is that papers will have to be curated and annotated through some combination of automated tools, professional curators and the papers' authors, who might, for example, be prevailed on to write their abstracts in a more structured machine-readable form.

The right people

Are authors willing to add to the already arduous task of writing an article? And are authors even the best people to do this job? The journal FEBS Letters experimented in 2009 with structured digital abstracts to see how authors would respond and perform in shaping their own machine-readable abstracts. The results were not encouraging. Authors presented their abstracts about protein–protein interactions as structured paragraphs describing entities, the relationships between the entities and their methods using specific, simple vocabularies (for example, 'protein A interacts with protein B'). But the curators of a protein database didn't accept them, says de Waard. "Authors are not the right people to validate their own claims," she says. The community — referees, editors, curators, readers at large — is still needed.

This could be a business opportunity for the publishers, says Wilbanks: they could curate and mark up their publications for text and semantic mining and provide that as a value-added service.

"There's a lot of business out there for the publishers, but it's not the same business," says Allen Renear, associate dean for research at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "If they keep making PDFs, that's not going to work for them. They have to get into more of the semantic side of this."

Perhaps the largest challenge is getting scientists to use these tools. It will be up to the developers to demonstrate the benefits and make their wares easy to use.

That's going to be difficult, says Hunter. Academic informaticians are rewarded more for coming up with new algorithms, and less for making their programs usable and widely adoptable by biomedical scientists, he says. Only a few tools are being developed by companies for more widespread use.

Major issues that all technology developers will need to tackle are transparency, provenance and trust. Scientists won't trust what a computer is suggesting in terms of new connections or hypotheses if they don't know how the results were generated and what the primary sources were. "We as informaticians are going to have to take on these more user-driven and less technology-driven problems," says Hunter.

Even if researchers do start to trust the new tools, it's not clear how much of their reading they will delegate. "As reading becomes more effective," says Renear, "some people have speculated that we won't do as much because we'll get done what we need to do sooner." Or, he says, "it may be that we'll do more reading because it's more valuable. Which one is true is actually an empirical question."

Analysing articles in new ways leads to the larger question of whether the articles themselves should change in structure. If an article is to be boiled down into machine-readable bits, why bother writing whole articles in the first place? Why don't researchers just deal with statements and facts and distribute and mash them up to generate hypotheses and knowledge?

"Human commentary and insight are still extraordinarily valuable," says Martone. "Those insights don't immediately fall out of data without human ingenuity. So you need to be able to communicate that and that generally means building an argument and a set of supporting claims. These things are not going to go away any time soon."

Perception, Power, Attractiveness

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100126/full/news.2010.37.html?s=news_rss

Summary: Study says men like women who are shorter/in a lower position/ appear to have less "power". Women like men in the higher up position. While I do think this shows some obvious social bias, I guess its not really that hard to conclude that since you can sort of see that in society. Except with feminists.

...uselessResearchTopics++;

25.1.10

Book Meme

Not really one for books but this was amusing enough so I will try. :V

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

exit: the Cholesky decomposition of the Matrix is delivered in the upper triangle of a;

n: int;
entry: the order of the matrix;
aux: double aux[2,3];


...it's really hard to classify what counts as a sentence in a reference book of algorithms.

Prion Function

Quick Link you probably can't read:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100124/full/news.2010.29.html?s=news_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+news%2Frss%2Fmost_recent+%28NatureNews+-+Most+recent+articles%29

Long story short Prions keep myelin myelinated and aren't useless proteins after all.

EDIT: Nature News requires a subscription to see the news, but ScienceNOW does not. (Damn British. :V) So I'm providing the link to ScienceNow in case people are interested in this.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/125/4?rss=1

24.1.10

White Album (Unfinished)

The flow of White Album is kind of odd.


I think its hard to read the atmosphere of this anime. At first I thought it would be one of those sad and emotional type of anime (and in a way it is), but its different. Its not... directly depressing. Or more precisely, its not consistently in the emotional mood. Neither is it happy; in fact, perhaps it has the mellowest cheerful moments I've seen in comparison to other romance or school type anime. Both the sad and happy moments are there, and they happen from time to time, but its softened out, not to sharply contrast each other.

The lack of background music may serve a role in the mellowness of this anime. Because music usually emphasizes the emotional mood of the show, a lack of it will likewise soften or reduce that impact. Usually I think this is a bad idea but the show is still intriguing. I can't say that I like it yet, I'll have to continue with it. I can't say I dislike it either. Although, the way it flows does make me anxious wondering how it will turn out in the future.

22.1.10

Bungaku Shojo Movie is coming out earlier than I thought

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-01-22/bungaku-shoujo-haiyoru-nyaru-ani-promos-streamed

May 1st!!!!!


...too bad the DVD won't come out until end of 2010, most likely.

...:(

21.1.10

Games and Brains

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/120/4?rss=1

CLEARLY, I must have a small striatum because it took me 3 years to get anywhere in EFZ.

19.1.10

Hackers can be Researchers

From the editorial of Nature. I think this is pretty cool, if I had the knowledge to hack I'd probably like this as a research job. It's a lot more respectable than creating malware for some unknown company imo.

Security ethics

Manufacturers of computer systems should welcome researchers' efforts to find flaws.

In late December, Berlin-based computer-security researcher Karsten Nohl announced that his group had found a vulnerability in the algorithm used to prevent eavesdropping in the most widely used mobile telephone standard in the world.

News outlets around the globe quickly reported that the research would make it easy for anyone to listen in on mobile telephone calls. The industry group that promotes the standard, the GSM Association, just as quickly defended the system and played down the importance of Nohl's finding.

The episode has highlighted an ongoing tension in computer-security research. The need for such research has never been higher: malicious hacking attacks are rapidly getting bolder and more sophisticated, even as law-abiding citizens are being asked to do everything from vote to have their medical information stored on computerized systems. The best way for researchers to improve the security of these systems is to attack them — to find their flaws so that they can be fixed. But this can lead researchers into a grey area in which their efforts can look a lot like criminal activity.

Some manufacturers, fearful that the revelation of a flaw could undermine their credibility in the marketplace, have reacted furiously to such research. In 2008, for example, two groups were the subject of legal action by organizations attempting to prevent the release of weaknesses the researchers had found in the smart cards used in mass transit systems (see Nature doi:10.1038/news.2008.1044; 2008).

Both those attempts were ultimately unsuccessful and the research was disseminated. Nonetheless, the threat of legal action haunts the field, not least because of uncertainty over exactly what work is legal. Researchers were particularly incensed about the 2008 cases because both the groups had followed the community's widely accepted 'responsible disclosure' protocol: researchers who uncover a flaw don't go public until the system's developer has had a chance to fix it.

They were right to be outraged: security research done in the spirit of responsible disclosure is something that computer-system manufacturers should encourage, not fight. When flaws are detected and fixed before outlaws can exploit them, everyone benefits.

That said, not every computer-security researcher has been as meticulous about the conduct of their work. Investigators say that they have seen work published or presented at conferences that they personally are uncomfortable with.

The computer-security community should engage in a wide-ranging discussion of the ethics of its work, especially as researchers move into ever greyer areas, such as examining or even controlling networks of computers that have been taken over by criminals. If nothing else, this discussion could help it to head off a worst-case scenario in which a research project that oversteps the bounds leads to an onerous crackdown that impedes genuinely useful research.

Computer-security research is a relatively young field and many of its leading members are far removed from the traditional image of academics. Much of their research is disseminated through less formal routes than peer-reviewed journals, such as blogs, and their conferences can seem like strange, anarchistic affairs to researchers in other fields.

But the public now relies on these people to defend it against everything from credit-card fraudsters to terrorists. They are genuine researchers. And they deserve a considered ethical framework within which to conduct their vital activity.

17.1.10

Bungaku Shojo Movie

...is coming out end of 2010!! WakuWaku, I can't wait!

http://www.bungakushoujo.jp/

I hope they don't try to cram all 8 volumes into one movie. in fact, I hope they just do volume one in the movie. :V

...and then they can release 8 movies, like Harry Potter. >.>

EDIT: I can't spell japanese. EVEN THOUGH ITS IN THE WEB LINK ITSELF.

15.1.10

Baka to Test Anime (Rumor)

Ok I heard the first volume was covered in two episodes.

I guess I'll take everyone's word for it that the new anime sucks. :(

13.1.10

Bungaku Shojo

I don't know why I'm going off to read a bunch of Light Novels lately, but at least the ones I've read recently are rather entertaining. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of translations of novels available on baka-tsuki (or anywhere for that matter). Not that I blame them since they ARE translating entire novels. However, sometimes I wish they would redirect their translators from some of the more popular novels to others. In particular, Toradora (kind of shallow, mildly entertaining to read but it looks like others might be better) and Zero no Tsukima (Very shallow, about the same content as the anime, plus the translations are terrible) should get less attention than others. :(

But the title of this post obviously suggests I'm not here to rant on the rate of translations of light novels. Its just that this novel is a nice read so I thought I should say random thoughts on it. Consequently the front page for this series boasts that it won a series of awards from 2007 to 2009, with 2009 being the #1 best series and other details. So I don't think it really needs any more words of praise from me when there are those much more noteworthy that gave the series their appreciation. Considering how many allusions to other great novel works this author uses, I think he's pretty sophisticated in writing literature as well (in contrast to other light novelists, who can apparently be lawyers (Haruhi), businessmen (Spice and Wolf?), or other people who probably don't have much of an idea of what they're doing... not that that's a bad thing :V).

So, a few comments. First, I like the concept of eating literature. Somehow, I can relate very easily with this "eating literature" to concepts like me plowing through manga and anime (and, more recently, light novels). The "flavors" she likes to boast about I can very much imagine through the variety of anime series I've watched; indeed there are many times where I'm watching a series, and I can be like "this is so sweet~~!!! I can't handle much more!!" (Moe types), or "ah that was refreshing, a good wash down the throat" (Slice of Life, think Aria), to maybe "so savory, so savory, I want more!!" (Suspense, like Code Geass). And of course there are the bitter types, some more entertaining to eat than others. For the record 07-Ghost "tasted" quite horrible, it was like eating a vegetable salad where I hated all the ingredients except for the croutons on top.

My second comment will contain spoilers. (More spoilerish than a girl eating a book anyway)

I think Takeda-san and Shuuji-kun's characters are, rather than being directly linked to any type of personality, are more of representations, or extremes, of people's general concept of loneliness and misunderstanding. Some people indeed do not understand it, and feel a lot for others (I think my sister is very much like this). Some people can relate a little more to it, perhaps not being able to understand some emotions as well as others (I'm more in this range). And some people come very close to Takeda-san and Shuuji-kun, where they do not truly understand empathy at all.
However one of the issues that arises from this is the fact that these people still feel guilty for what they've done. They do not necessarily feel the sadness for having killed someone, yet they feel the guilt that they did so and even more so, without feeling any sadness after doing so. But wouldn't people who can't feel for others, have no sense of guilt as well? Perhaps this means that Takeda-san and Shuuji-kun are NOT farfetched extreme examples of emotionless people (I know there is a science term out there but I don't know what it is :V) but only missing a few pieces.
So I guess in that respect I just disproved myself. Those two are not the most extreme examples of (emo, or emotionless?) people out there, though they are pretty extreme in themselves. The world is a big place with a lot of people. It's hard to understand everyone.

The last comment I like to make is, Takeda-san reminds me of a person in anime club. Perhaps not as extreme as the character in the book though.

12.1.10

Vocaloid vs. Facebook

The Vocaloid Fan Page is getting shut down. WTF?
=====
Dear members of the vocaloid fan page. I have an important and sad announcement to make. Because of facebook's idiotic rules and progressive screwing up of the terms of service, they are now requiring that this "FAN PAGE" to be authenticated with the official Vocaloid site. I assume they are referring to Crypton and the other vocaloid companies. This page is not affiliated with any official vocaloid companies, and is and always will be a fan page.

But yea unfortunately the party's over, and they're going to freeze this page in the next 3 weeks. I just wanted to say thank you for everyone who was a fan of the page up until now. If anyone has suggestions on what can be done, feel free to voice them. From reading threads on facebook about owners of other pages, it's pretty much a lost hope.

Well it was fun while it lasted. Facebook Sucks.
皆さん長い間お世話になりました。
ヾ(・ω・`)ノバイヾ(・ω・`)ノバイ
=====
Well I wasn't an AVID fan of the fan page but it was most definitely one of the better, if not best fan page I've joined (I have joined quite a couple). Their daily Vocaloid links are especially entertaining because I typically only go after GUMI (and Yuki, but she doesn't have much of any songs being released) and not the other Vocaloids. I don't want to sort through the hundreds of Miku songs coming in every day when she isn't my favorite singer in the first place. Plus occasional Rin and Luka was good too. No other fan page was that helpful, or that useful, or that much fun.

ReasonToWasteTimeOnFacebook--;

9.1.10

Best Touhou Parody I have seen, ever

...but before that minirant: WHY IS IT THAT NO ONE CLOSE TO ME HAS FINISHED WATCHING BAKEMONOTAGARI I CAN'T FANBOY WITH ANYONE %#^&!%&^@#%&%^%^&%^&%^!!!!


Baka to Test to Syokanju (Light Novel)

A while ago I wrote something about test-taking and academia being something like an action-adventure game in my head.

...

http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=Baka_to_Tesuto_to_Syokanju

I wish my academic life was like this.

BTW I label this as anime because the anime for this just came out this season, and if the anime is as good as the light novel (I suspect better because the action scenes can't be done as well in light novels), then I would highly suggest people watch it.

Ironically I think Himeji would be a new top favorite character of mine if only her hair WASN'T pink. I wonder why that was a turnoff this time... it must be Louise's fault.

7.1.10

Comments

Due to significant pressure from outside sources, our work has been opened to the general public for critical review. Criticisms will be taken into account for our future research projects and to ensure such roles will not result in misunderstandings within any of the parties in question.
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In the words of a great Physicist now a high school teacher, "Maybe."

Science R&D 2010

I'm going to copy and paste something from Nature because most people can't access the magazine, but I think this article is really cool. I don't claim to own Nature or anything (etcetc copyright issues). The synthetic microbe full of custom genome libraries one is in particular pretty awesome.


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New year, new science

Nature looks at what key events may come from the research world in 2010.

How many species will join the Rajah Brooke's birdwing butterfly on the protected list?How many species will join the Rajah Brooke's birdwing butterfly on the protected list?J. CARMICHAEL JR/NHPA

Stopping species loss

The United Nations has proclaimed 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity, to culminate in an October summit in Nagoya, Japan, that hopes to establish strategies to prevent biodiversity loss — probably by setting out ways to try to halt the current decline by 2050. New ideas are sorely needed: this year, 120 countries will miss a goal set by a 2002 accord to achieve a 'significant reduction' in biodiversity loss.

Planck peeks at the Universe's origin

The first detailed images of the cosmic microwave background sent back by the European Space Agency's Planck mission could alter theories about the origins and structure of the early Universe. Full results won't be officially released until 2012.

Life, but not as we know it

Surely this will be the year when genome pioneer Craig Venter and his team reveal they have booted up a laboratory-made genome inside a living bacterial cell, to create what will be billed as synthetic life.

An Antarctic time machine

An ice core from Antarctica could provide the sort of year-by-year climate records already gathered in the Northern Hemisphere from Greenland. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Ice Core project is in the final stages of pulling up a 3.4-kilometre-long climate record that covers the past 40,000 years in enough detail to compare how the north and south polar regions warm up, or chill, in relation to one another.

A flood of genomes

The completed Neanderthal genome and the genomes of remaining primates will count among the highlights of another year of ever-cheaper DNA-crunching. Following last year's comprehensive portraits of cancer genomes, medically minded sequencing will continue to focus on the causes of specific diseases, and on spotting more human genetic variants.

Mexico City: the new Copenhagen

Starting in late November, Mexico will be the venue for the next major round of United Nations climate-policy wrangling, where an overdue formal agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change may finally be hammered out. Before then, attention will focus on the action that individual countries need to take on their commitments, on climate legislation in the United States and on international standards to monitor emissions and verify promised reductions.

Earth-like worlds elsewhere

As planet-hunters eagerly await the discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone around a Sun-like star, they may have to make do this year with an easier target: a potentially hospitable planet around a red dwarf star. NASA's Kepler telescope has already discovered previously unknown planets (see page 15).

Hope for HIV prevention

Early this year, the first clinical trial to use a gel incorporating an antiretroviral drug is expected to release its initial results; several large trials of other microbicides have failed to show benefit in blocking HIV. Early results are also due from long-anticipated trials that look at 'pre-exposure prophylaxis', or administering anti-HIV drugs before risky sex.

A perfect symmetry

Evidence for supersymmetry — the theory that every known fundamental particle has an undiscovered, superheavy partner — may be the most intriguing discovery to come from Europe's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The find would be even more bizarre than the anticipated Higgs boson, the particle thought to imbue matter with mass.

Quantum effects go large

Solid objects in physics laboratories could be seen to enter a superposition of states — the real-world version of Schrödinger's mythical cat that is dead and alive at the same time. The effect, predicted by quantum mechanics, has previously been seen in objects no bigger than ions, but could push into the macroscopic realm this year.

Cell reprogramming gets safer

Induced pluripotent stem cells will probably be created from adult cells using small molecules — lessening the risk of tumours, which comes with adding genetic material to a cell. Safer, more efficient reprogramming routes could lead to the field's first therapeutic applications.

Embryonic stem cells go clinical

The first clinical trials of therapies involving human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) could finally come this year. Biotech company Geron, of Menlo Park, California, plans to restart regulator-halted trials of an hESC-derived therapy for patients with spinal-cord injuries.

Space travel crosses frontiers

Among the year's planned space launches are Japan's Akatsuki, to orbit Venus, and China's second lunar probe, Chang'e 2. And as NASA looks set to choose a new direction for its human space-flight programme, a decision that could come early in 2010, the US space-shuttle fleet will make its final outings. These include the July launch of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an instrument to study cosmic rays for evidence of antimatter and dark matter.

X-rays with laser-sharp focus

X-ray free-electron lasers, which produce short pulses of coherent X-ray light, may start to assert their superiority over synchrotrons for imaging. They should enable researchers to make images of single biomolecules without having to crystallize them, and to create detailed movies of molecular events such as protein folding. Data will flow from the first of these facilities, at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California.

Climate computing heats up

Expect increasingly realistic climate models from several recently launched supercomputers, including the Earth Simulator II in Yokohama, Japan, and Blizzard in Hamburg, Germany. As some of the world's 40 most powerful computers, they will improve on two of the largest uncertainties of current simulations: resolving local eddies in ocean circulation, and providing long-term forecasts of cloud behaviour. Blizzard will also incorporate Earth's carbon cycle into its climate models.

FOR RESEARCH

It's no longer "For Science".


It's now just "FOR RESEARCH"!!

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/106/3?rss=1


Again most people probably can't read this but look at the title.


FOR RESEARCH!!!!!

5.1.10

Vocaloids and Visual Novels

I think there's been other VNs that have been using Vocaloid to sing their theme songs but THIS ONE IS DONE BY YUKI

YUKI WHICH EVERYONE ABANDONED AFTER LIKE A WEEK D: D: D:

BUT I'D TOTALLY SHOW MY SUPPORT TOWARDS THIS GROUP! :V

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm9265641

I'd write maybe a longer entry on VNs and Vocaloid but I have to leave to catch my bus... right now. :V

Molecular Puzzle-Solving

The Chemist's version of "we have nothing to do so lets make something fairly useless for fun." :V

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100105/full/463014a.html?s=news_rss