Murphy's Law of PS3s

For the record:

In my attempt, today, to buy a PS3 for the second time, it was found to be sold out:

-Best Buy* x2
-GameStop*
-Target* x3
-Toys R Us
-Fry's*
-Game Crazy

The starred stores indicate that I went the week earlier and it was sold out then, too. Apparently the guy from Toy's R Us said that they've been sold out for 3 weeks already, which makes sense, I think, since about 3 weeks ago (or was it 4?) I saw stacks upon stacks of PS3s at Fry's. And somehow 2 weeks later they were all gone. My prediction is something happened during President's Day Weekend that made all the PS3 consoles disappear.

Three theories:
1. Some university decided to start a new simulation lab/project and bought all the PS3s to do use their GPUs to do ultra high resolution simulations. However my friend tells me this is not likely since PS3 slims do not support Linux installment anymore.
2. A lot of people suddenly are interested in a new game (Most likely FFXIII, slight chance Heavy Rain) and now want a PS3. The former seems most likely, possibly after all the rumors about Xbox's version having more crappy quality. And the fact that all the fan(girl?)s were holding out on buying PS3s because there was nothing good on them, but now that the date is coming near they finally went to go get them.
3. Microsoft is making a conspiracy by stripping all stores of PS3s, forcing people to buy Xbox 360s to play their FFXIII game. Well, if they bought all the consoles that would be pretty stupid since that means they just gave Sony alot of money though.

...

I don't think the last one is very likely. :V

Facebook Games, and more

Considering how much I've seen people on my friends list been playing facebook games, I think this is quite relevant.

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/

Ironically posted on facebook by a friend. Thanks Ian!

Mornings

Because I'm such a celebrity I'm sure you're all dying of curiosity to know how my mornings are like.

Moar Bad Apples

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm9837984

REALLY JAPAN, HOW DO YOU DO THIS. HOW.

Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari

I posted this on buzz but HAHAHA GUMI'S VERSION OF THE ENDING (to bakamonogatari) BEAT MIKU'S VERSION BWAHAHHAHAA HAHAHAHA HAHAHAHA yes I know I'm crazy.

Depression Research

Neuroscience: Baby blues

Stress or trauma in very early life can lead to anxiety and depression in adulthood, and previous evidence has implicated corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) as a contributor to this outcome.

Louis Muglia of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his colleagues have narrowed down CRH's involvement using mice in which they could control expression of the hormone in the forebrain. When the reseachers raised CRH levels during the first 21 days after birth, the mice went on to show anxious and despairing behaviours as adults. These behaviours could be normalized with antidepressants.

The mice could serve as a model to help find a means of preventing long-term consequences of childhood stress.

=====

Somehow, I felt like I've seen these results before... somewhere in real life...

If only the world was like anime, where a childhood traumatic response only makes the character more adorable!...Well adorable really isn't the right word, but at least having the effects be not as terrible as it seems in real life.

From Nature Magazine.

Moar Haruhi

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-02-24/haruhi-new-light-novel-to-be-previewed-in-the-sneaker

REALLY?!?!? FINALLY?!?!?! After leaving it at a hanger for 3 years.

...too bad Baka-tsuki got the letter and was told to drop it. OTL

Those JAPANESE!!!!

I was just watching some hold Shiori replay videos from long time ago. i watched this one a couple times already but I watched it again now that I have more experience playing with Shiori just to see how they can make their combos so long and etc. I mostly understand how it works (executing it is a whole different thing), except for one part.

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm885631

late 4:32, beginning of 4:33 (right that instance before the IC)

WAT DA FAK.

:V

What

http://kotaku.com/5477407/kotaku+tan-the-t+shirt-for-the-kotaku-fan

Shameless self-promotion?

Actually I'm just surprised by the comments seeing how people are actually buying into it and not going like "zomg kotaku is being too japanese culturish by anthopomorphizing itself into a cute anime girl!!" like what I think most of wikipedia said.

Well, yea, I guess its not loli at least.

Sasameki Koto

I wasn't going to write a detailed blog post about this series, since it wasn't really the greatest thing in the world, but it was a nice watch. But after watching the series feeling amused, then looking up the manga (because I like going to the source of things), then reading a few more chapters, still pretty amused, I feel like mentioning something about the character Kazama.

Well, I think this is sort of immature and stupid-sounding stating it straight out, but... her character reminds me a lot like myself.

Of course, lets get the obvious counterarguments out of the way first.
-I'm not a girl.
-I'm not cute.
-I'm not a cute girl.
-I'm not homosexual either.
-Although I like pretty cute girls of similar type to hers I do not oogle over them (directly) as this would obviously be a bad image upon me, for the reasons that were stated above (first three)
-I'm not in high school.
-I'm not in anime.
-I don't have anyone that has a crush on me that I'm nearly oblivious to (currently, 99% sure)

That being said.

Perhaps Kazama relates to a lot of people. Or maybe her friend Murasame relates to more people, although for sure I feel like Kazama's nature is more of one I can relate to. I think it has to do with her personality and her confidence or trust in people that makes it seem that I'm similar to her.

In terms of personality, she is a character that is typically shy and quiet amongst people (sans adorably cute girls) and a person that doesn't want to hurt others, while also not wanting to hurt herself. However, even though she will put up a wall of timidity if she is around people she doesn't know, she will just as easily bring it down if she has someone she has confidence in, and will almost immediately reveal her more playful, borderline otaku nature. I purposely use the adjective "borderline otaku" since it almost feels a lot like how I act, in that, usually with people I don't really have confidence in, or people that don't understand the same hobbies as I do I won't talk too much, yet if I have a friend whom I can confide in I won't hesitate to reveal my quirky nature even if I'm in public. I'm pretty sure its a loneliness thing.

Another aspect. Kazama is the type that wants company from other people (or at the very least from those she likes), but at the same time doesn't want to feel intruding. Sometimes she will be eager to find Murasame to play with, but then sometimes she feels she was too eager and backs off. Often times when she backs off, though, she gives off the aura of loneliness, yet she doesn't complain. Its another possibly cute aspect of her, if I haven't seen it in myself a few times before...:V

Another thing is that she's pretty oblivious to things she doesn't give notice to. Of course the most obvious is Murasame's feelings, but you can sort of see the stubborn field of vision of her "cute girls" obsession, in that she rarely cares about what anyone else says, as long as she can live out her fantasies. Again, going back to before, if she has no one to confide in, she'll just keep silent about her obsessions, however, they are (of course) still there. And the fact that she will freely talk about them to people shows that she's not really concerned about others' opinion on her as much as if they'd still be with her and not leave her alone (well, I suppose that has some dependence on others' opinion, although I think as long as she has one person that will stick with her she'll be perfectly happy).

...Well, I want to say reasons why I am the same but I can't seem to do so without sounding remarkably cheesey.

Although when I come to think of this post, its already pretty cheesey in itself. :V

IN SHORT WHAT I SEEM TO BE SAYING IS:

If I:
-were a girl, and
-had an obsession with cute girls instead of moe culture (you could ALMOST say that those are the same, but they aren't)

I'd probably be just like her. V:

...man, this was a pretty stupid post.

Code Geass Knights and Queens

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-02-22/bandai-ent-adds-code-geass/knights-and-queens-manga

Wh-wh-awha? :V

A character image book is one thing, but an actual (fanservice) manga, seperated to guys and girls?... :V

...I think I want to get "Queens" regardless...

Lacking Sleep is a Drug

We all knew it was gonna be found out eventually.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/02/lack-of-sleep-is-contagious.html

Geoengineering - Opinions?

I'm interested in knowing what people (ie all two of you) think about the concept of Geoengineering. Because I'm lazy and don't want to do a lengthy explanation of what geoengineering is, I give you a link that gives a good idea.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/02/the-latest-on-hacking-the-planet.html

As for my own opinion, I find it fascinating. I know the moral standings and the significant consequences on what would happen if things went wrong, but its one of those "lets try it for the good of the world and see what happens!" things, I think.

Nogizaka Haruka S2

Obligatory

HARUKA YOU ARE SO CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTE

More School Shootings

...but of a different kind.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100216/full/463856a.html

Really? D: Students is one thing, but professors? Professor-shootings? In the Biology department?? By a NEUROSCIENTIST, of all kinds???

Quote of the Day

From Facebook:

"Looking through the [Zettai Ryouiki] pics at school is not a good idea. D: I got into big trouble for a Miku hatsune picture that was displayed. FML"

WELL REALLY NOW.

Bacteria can develop antibiotic resistance? REALLY?!?

This is one of those "do you really need to tell us this again" articles.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/211/1?rss=1

Oh well. Research, PROGRESS!!!!

EDIT: Not relevant at all, except in the redundancy part. ELEPHANTS CAN'T RUN!! Now what can we do with this information for future research...
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/212/1?rss=1

NIS licenses anime

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-02-11/nis-america-licenses-toradora-as-its-first-anime

I heard NIS doing not-so-well these past days from Kotaku, probably something to do with game sales (didn't hear much about any good games they've been releasing lately, I think they might have been milking Disgaea for a bit too long). So now they're resorting to licensing anime?

Dunno how well that will go for them, though. :V

Misuzu Japanese Replays

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm9682836

BEST. ENDING. EVER.

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm9682893

I've played a lot of Mais, and I've watched a lot of Mai replays but... I'm pretty confident in admitting this is the SCARIEST Mai I have ever seen. Namely because this Mai seems to use (a LOT) the two techniques Mais do best: zoning, and crossovers. Typically I either see (or play) a rushdown crossover Mai, or maybe one that tends to play a distance game; this one can do both, REALLY well.

Stuttering

Clearly, I am a genetic defect.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/210/3?rss=1

Free Eroge! For Everyone!

http://zepy.momotato.com/2010/02/09/upcoming-eroge-sekirara-to-be-distributed-free/

You know even if they're going to try to make money by relying on merchandise purchases, is 30,000 yen/figma really going to make up to the cost of selling an eroge at regular price...? o_O

Morals and Religion

HI RICHARD THIS IS FOR YOU.

Disclaimer I don't own Nature etc. etc. etc.
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100208/full/news.2010.55.html
=====

Morals don't come from God

The finding that religion scarcely influences moral intuition undermines the idea that a godless society will be immoral, says Philip Ball. Whether it 'explains' religion is another matter.

Philip Ball

"Religion," novelist Mary McCarthy wrote, "is only good for good people." Weigh the violence of the Inquisition against the humanity of Martin Luther King or homicidal fanatics against Oxfam, and you have to suspect that religion supplies a context for justifying or motivating moral choices rather than a reason for them.

Into this bitterly contested arena comes a new paper by psychologists Ilkka Pyysiäinen of the University of Helsinki and Marc Hauser of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts¹. They point out that individuals presented with unfamiliar moral dilemmas show no difference in their responses if they have a religious background or not.

The study draws on tests of moral judgements using versions of the web-based Moral Sense Test that Hauser and others have developed at Harvard^2,3,4,5,6. These tests present dilemmas ranging from how to handle freeloaders at 'bring a dish' dinner parties to the justification of killing someone to save others. Few, if any, of the answers can be looked up in holy books.

Good by nature

Thousands of people — varying widely in social background, age, education, religious affiliation and ethnicity — have taken the tests. Pyysiäinen and Hauser say the results (mainly still in the publication pipeline) indicate that "moral intuitions operate independently of religious background", although religion may influence responses in a few highly specific cases.

Atheists behave as well as believers in many moral tests.Michelangelo Buonarroti/ Tomisti

This finding may speak to the origins of religion. Some researchers have suggested it is an adaptation that promotes cooperation between unrelated individuals^7,8 — by, for example, discouraging cheating with the notion that 'God is watching'. Others say that religious behaviour is not specifically evolutionarily selected for in human evolution, but arises as a by-product of other cognitive functions and capacities^9,10: religion may, for instance, have appropriated underlying psychological reasons for a belief in souls and an afterlife.

Because religion has little influence on moral judgements, say Pyysiäinen and Hauser, the latter hypothesis seems more likely. They argue that human populations evolved moral ideas about behavioural norms — which themselves promoted group cooperation — before they became encoded in religious systems. The researchers suggest that we may possess an innate 'moral grammar' that guides these ideas.

The paper plays to a wider issue than this point of largely anthropological interest, for it challenges the assertion commonly made in defence of religion: that it inculcates a moral awareness¹¹. If we follow the authors' line of thinking, religious people are no more likely to be moral than atheists.

Pyysiäinen and Hauser do not wholly deny that religion is adaptive. They think that natural selection may have fine-tuned it, from an existing array of moral-determining cognitive functions, to optimize its benefits for cooperation. There is some evidence that religion promotes in-group altruism and self-sacrifice beyond that displayed by non-believers^12,13.

Core beliefs

The authors' paper may annoy both religious and atheistic zealots. By taking it as a given that religion is an evolved social behaviour rather than a matter of divine revelation, it tacitly adopts an atheistic framework. Yet at the same time it assumes that religiosity is a fundamental aspect of human psychology, thereby undermining those who see it as culturally imposed folly that can be erased with a cold shower of rationality.

It's debatable, however, whether these moral tests are probing religion or culture as a moral-forming agency, because non-believers in a predominantly religious culture are likely to acquire the moral predispositions of the majority. Western culture, say, has long been shaped by Christian morality.

All the same, the tests show that neither culture nor religion matter very much: other factors — presumed to be inherited — dictate our judgements.

Certainly, religious moral doctrine sometimes displays such inconsistency that you have to suspect it is being shaped by unspoken prior judgements — rather than religious tenets as such. Take, for example, the Catholic church's early opposition to in vitro fertilization, which sat alongside an otherwise fierce prohibition of any hindrance to procreation. And most religions have the same set of core moral principles about lying, theft and murder, all with evident adaptive benefits to a group, beyond which the details (Christian original sin, say) are a question of historical contingency.

But to uncover religion's roots, is morality necessarily the best place to look? It seems hard to credit the idea that the immense cultural investment in religion was made merely to strengthen and fine-tune existing neural circuits related to morality. Some people place more emphasis on the adaptive rationale for religious symbols and mystical beliefs, rather than morals¹⁰.

Yet attempting to explain the origins of such a rich cultural phenomenon as religion is doomed to some extent to be a thankless task. For to 'explain' Chartres Cathedral or Bach's Mass in B Minor in terms of non-kin cooperation is obviously to have explained nothing.

New Laptop

Order of doing things

1. Format computer (get rid of new computer junk)
2. Install Windows 7 Professional
3. Install Firefox
4. Copy EFZ over, get it working (ie dealing with graphics issues)
5. Install Endpoint security
6. Set GUMI wallpaper
7.Install Matlab
8. Adobe Flash Player (Nicovideo)
9. Activate Matlab
10. Install DirectX
11. Change Profile Picture
12. Install CCCP (Test an episode)
13. Spybot stuff

I think that's all I'll do for now. There are other stuff I need to put on later, like leafChat for IRC/downloading, SWR Hisoten, and Microsoft Office but obviously there are things that need to be prioritized.

Like EFZ.

EDIT: \o/

Against - GUMI

Well not really. Originally this was a GUMI song. In Japanese. (I didn't really like it) And now someone translated it. And sung it.

...huh. Well, it worked at least. The singer is pretty good too.

http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm9585255

EDIT: LOL ITS MELT IN ENGLISH TOO: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2036877

DUDE IT SOUNDS LIKE BLINK 182 AHAHAHAHAHAHA

while(Love < int.MAX_VALUE)

/* *
* http://zepy.momotato.com/2010/02/03/new-game-love-plus-revealed/
* */
Love++;

Power Cubes

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/cubesat-01115.html

SEE

I'M IMPORTANT

Recoil Guard

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/203/1?rss=1

I wasn't particularly interested in the reasoning or statement behind this article except I thought that this was particularly related to the issue of recoil guarding (or whatever other similar action in other fighting games) where you only have a small time frame to immediately counter an opponent's attack with a sudden block, gaining some small advantage in the process. When you read about this directly, the initial thought is "that's nearly impossible, you'd have to predict your opponent's moves before he even does them", but then (as this article shows) the reaction time, in contrast to the acting time, is amazing. Most likely this action never even really reaches the brain (for example I might be RGing before I even realize I'm RGing) due to set "reaction" motor neurons in parts, which also, coincidentally, can be learned.

Relating Science to EFZ!

Blog Theory

Akuun randomly linked me today to an interesting blog (specifically he linked me to an entry about theory of tsundere) that, admittedly, sort of made me think for a moment, "wait, should I be blogging like this?"

The concept of blogging is, of course, up to one's discretion. No one is going to punish me (I think) that I post links to random academic science news sites with a one-liner akin to a 14 year-old's random spurts on a forum. In a way I find this amusing myself, due to the sheer irony of the situation. But as blogging communities grow and become more diverse, I think its quite custom for people to look at blogs and be like, "yes, I should be blogging like this" or "I want my blog to look something like that". This is sort of the trend I felt, temporarily, when I first saw the blog, possibly a slight uncomfortable mixture of admiration and jealousy.

Yet in the end, I think blogging should really just be what you want to blog. I began looking at all the other blogs this site links to and a majority of them are anime review site blogs; while in the beginning I wanted to do something of that sort, I sort of gave up on it later on because I was lazy it was not my main interest. Similarly there were times I wanted to write stories but I just gave up because I was lazy I felt there were other things that were of higher priority than to just "waste my time on something that's so insignificant". Although stuff like stories and long posts come out sometimes. Usually when that happens I have to write down EVERYTHING I can think of in 20 minutes before my focus is lost again.

Like this post. :V

But I digress. Looking at impressive writings on blogs is nice, although honestly I almost never read it all. Looking at short blurbs seems "casual" for lack of a better term, although they look really neat in those Japanese celebrity blogs which I can't read. Consequently now when I think about it my blog lies somewhere in between, usually consisting of random idle thoughts in one line (usually matched with a science or anime link) and the occasional ridiculous braindump that occurs when I am 1. Bored with nothing much else to do and 2. have been constantly thinking of writing it up for the last hour or longer. And when I really think about it and conceptualize it out, I wouldn't want my blog to be any better. Or more popular. (My blog does not have the concept of living or dying and I do not have an obligation to post, and I think this is in part due to my mindset of "I don't care to be popular and/or I don't want to be popular" since popularity can be a hindrance and make you develop an obligation to post sometimes although ironically I try and tell other people to make a blog/post on their blog so I have something to read while at work).

...Actually I originally wanted to talk about Moe state system equations where you can input a character and output a moe factor as a ranking number, but I digressed. :V That will have to wait for another day when I get bored.

Maybe. V:

FYI Here is the link to the blog I was talking about. My only regret is that he stopped blogging and there doesn't seem to be an opening to contact him, and talk about things. :( http://animeacademy.wordpress.com/

EDIT: Random note: Knowing that people read your blog will sometimes alter what you write, too. I've noticed this recently.

Bungaku Shojo licensed

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-02-03/yen-press-adds-haruhi-chan-k-on-manga-bungaku-shoujo

EVERYONE YOU SHOULD GO OUT AND BUY IT


...damn when is the second novel going to come out now?

Fixing the Internets

Another article by Nature News. It's nice to see that in big name science issues like Nature, the topic of the internet has grown large enough to warrent future research.(Nature is not owned by me, etc., etc)

Networking: Four ways to reinvent the Internet

The Internet is struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing demands placed on it. Katharine Gammon looks at ways to fix it.

Katharine Gammon

The Internet is feeling the strain. Developed in the 1970s and 1980s for a community of a few thousand researchers, most of whom knew and trusted one another, the Internet has now become a crucial worldwide infrastructure that connects nearly two billion people, roughly a quarter of humanity. It offers up something like a trillion web pages, and transports roughly 10 billion gigabytes of data a month — a figure that is expected to quadruple by 2012. Moreover, those two billion users are exploiting the network in ways that its creators only dimly imagined, with applications ranging from e-commerce to cloud computing, streaming audio and video, ubiquitous mobile devices and the transport of massive scientific data sets from facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, based near Geneva, Switzerland.

To some extent, this rapidly rising flood of information has been dealt with by updating the software and expanding the size of the data pipes — a development that most Internet users experience through the proliferation of 'broadband' services provided through cable television connections, digital subscriber lines and wireless hot spots. Yet users continue to be plagued by data congestion, slowdowns and outages, especially in wireless networks. And, as dramatized in January when search-engine giant Google publicly protested against digital assaults coming from somewhere in China, everyone on the Internet is vulnerable to cyberattack by increasingly sophisticated hackers who are almost impossible to trace — security having been an afterthought in the Internet's original design.

The result has been a rising sense of urgency within the networking research community — a conviction that the decades-old Internet architecture is reaching the limits of its admittedly remarkable ability to adapt and needs a fundamental overhaul. Since 2006, for example, the Future Internet Design (FIND) programme run by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded researchers trying to develop wholesale redesigns of the Internet. And since October 2008, the NSF has operated the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI): a dedicated, national fibre-optic network that researchers can use to test their creations in a realistic setting. Similar efforts are under way in Europe, where the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) initiative is being funded through the European Union's Seventh Framework research programme; and in Japan, where in 2008 the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology launched JGN2plus, the latest iteration of its Japan Gigabit Network system.

Buoyed by these funding initiatives, researchers have been testing out a plethora of ideas for reinventing the Internet. It is still too early to know which will pan out. But the following four case studies give a sense of both the possibilities and the challenges.

Make the pipes adaptable

The problem with the bigger-and-bigger-data-pipe approach to dealing with the Internet's growth is that it perpetuates a certain dumbness in the system, says electrical engineer Keren Bergman of Columbia University in New York. Right now, there is no way for a user to say: "This ultrahigh-resolution video conference I'm in is really important, so I need to send the data with the least delay and highest bandwidth possible", or "I'm just doing routine e-mail and web surfing at the moment, so feel free to prioritize other data". The network treats every bit of data the same. There is also no way for the Internet to minimize redundancy. If 1,000 people are logged into a massively multiplayer role-playing game such as World of Warcraft, the network has to provide 1,000 individual data streams, even though most are close to identical.

The result is a lot of wasted capacity, says Bergman, not to mention a lot of wasted money for users who have to pay extra for high-capacity data connections that they will need only occasionally. If the Internet could just adapt intelligently to what its users are trying to do, she says, it could run much more data though the pipes than it does now, thereby giving users much more capacity at a lower cost.

This is easier said than done, however, because the dumbness is deliberate. In an effort to simplify the engineering, Bergman explains, the architecture of the Internet is carefully segregated into 'layers' that take one another for granted. This means that application programmers, for example, don't have to worry about physical data connections when they are developing new software for streaming video or online data processing; they can just assume that the bits will flow. Likewise, engineers working on the physical connections can ignore what the applications are doing. And neither has to worry about in-between layers such as TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): the fundamental Internet software that governs how digital messages are broken up into 'packets', routed to their destination, then reassembled.

But this clean separation also stops the layers from communicating with one another, says Bergman, which is exactly what they need to do if the data flow is to be managed intelligently. Working out how to create such a 'cross-layer' networking architecture is therefore one of the central goals of Bergman's Lightwave Research Laboratory at Columbia. The idea is to provide feedbacks between the physical data connection and the higher-level routing and applications layers, then to use those feedbacks to help the layers adjust to one another and optimize the network's performance.

This kind of adaptability is not new in networking, says Bergman, but it has been difficult to implement for the fibre-optic cables that are carrying more and more of the Internet's traffic. Unlike standard silicon electronics, optical data circuits are not easily programmable. As a result, many of the dozen projects now under way in her lab aim to integrate optics with programmable electronic systems.

Bergman's lab is also a key member of the NSF-funded Center for Integrated Access Networks, a nine-university consortium headquartered at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her group's efforts have helped to drive many of the technology development projects at the centre, which hopes to ultimately deliver data to users at rates that approach 10 gigabits a second, roughly 1,000 times faster than the average household broadband connection today. "The challenges are to deliver that information at a reasonable cost in terms of money and power," says Bergman.

Control the congestion

Meanwhile, however, some researchers are taking issue with TCP itself. Any time a data packet fails to reach its destination, explains Steven Low, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, TCP assumes that the culprit is congestion at one of the router devices that switch packets from one data line to another. So it orders the source computer to slow down and let the backlog clear. And generally, says Low, TCP is right: whenever too many data try to crowd through such an intersection, the result is a digital traffic jam, followed by a sudden spike in the number of packets that get garbled, delayed or lost. Moreover, the tsunami of data now pouring through the Internet means that congestion can crop up anywhere, whether the routers are switching packets between high-capacity fibre-optic land lines carrying data across a continent, or funnelling them down a copper telephone wire to a user's house.

But more and more often, says Low, simple congestion is not the reason for lost packets, especially when it comes to smart phones, laptop computers and other mobile devices. These devices rely on wireless signals, which are subject to interference from hills, buildings and the like, and have to transfer their connection from one wireless hub to the next as the devices move around. They offer many opportunities for things to go wrong in ways that won't be helped by slowing down the source — a practice that just bogs down the network unnecessarily.

Researchers have been exploring several more-flexible ways to transmit data, says Low. One of these is FAST TCP, which he and his Caltech colleagues have been developing over the past decade, and which is now being deployed by the start-up company FastSoft in Pasadena. FAST TCP bases its decisions on the delay faced by packets as they go through the network. If the average delay is high, congestion is probably the cause, and FAST TCP reduces speed as usual. But if the delay is not high, FAST TCP assumes that something else is the problem and sends packets along even faster, helping to keep the network's overall transmission rate high.

To test his FAST TCP algorithms, Low's lab teamed up with Caltech's high-energy physics community, which needed to transmit huge files to researchers in 30 countries on a daily basis. From 2003 to 2006, the team broke Internet world network speed records at the International Supercomputing Conference's annual Bandwidth Challenge, which is carried out on the ultrahigh-speed US research networks Internet2 and National LambdaRail. In the 2006 event, they demonstrated a sustained speed of 100 gigabits per second, and a peak transfer speed of 131 gigabits per second — records that have not been substantially bettered by subsequent winners of the challenge.

Integrate social-networking concepts

What's great about the Internet, says computer scientist Felix Wu of the University of California, Davis, is that anyone with an address on the network can contact anyone else who has one. But that's also what's terrible about it. "Global connectivity means you have no way to prevent large-scale attacks," he says, citing as an example recent digital assaults that have temporarily shut down popular sites such as Twitter. "At the same time you are getting convenience, you are actually giving people the power to do damage."

In 2008, for example, security software maker Symantec in Mountain View, California, detected 1.6 million new threats from computer viruses and other malicious software — more than double the 600,000 or so threats detected the previous year — and experts say that these attacks will only get more common and more sophisticated in the future.

What particularly drew Wu's attention a few years ago was the problem of unsolicited junk e-mail, or 'spam', which accounts for an estimated 90–95% of all e-mails sent. What makes spam trivial to broadcast and hard to filter out, Wu reasoned, is the Internet's anonymity: the network has no social context for either the message or the sender. Compare that with ordinary life, where people generally know the individuals they are communicating with, or have some sort of connection through a friend. If the network could somehow be made aware of such social links, Wu thought, it might provide a new and powerful defence against spam and other cyberattacks.

With funding from the NSF, Wu has created a test bed for such ideas, called Davis Social Links. The test bed has a messaging system that routes packets between users on the basis of the lists of friends that each person creates in social networking sites such as Facebook. This gives test-bed users the option of accepting only the messages that reach them through the paths or groups they trust, making it more difficult for them to be reached by spammers or attackers who lack the proper trusted paths.

These social relationships in the system don't have to be restricted to people, Wu notes. Websites are fair game too. Users of Davis Social Links can build social relationships with YouTube, for example. A search engine based on this social-network idea might pick up two sites that claim to be YouTube, one that is real and one that is cloned to look like the video site. The system would try one and if it didn't have the expected connections to other trusted contacts, the path would be designated as untrustworthy and the site dropped. "In today's routing you only give the IP address to the service provider, they do the rest," says Wu. "In social routing I don't have a unique identity. I have a social identity that supports different routing."

Davis Social Links is part of the GENI test bed and will soon start testing with up to 10 million network nodes. But even if this approach turns out not to be viable, says Wu, more types of social research need to be integrated into the future Internet. "We need to mimic real human communication," he says.

Break from reality

Computer scientist Jonathan Turner of Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, says that the basic packet-delivery service hasn't changed in more than 20 years not because no one has a better idea, but because new ideas can't get a foothold. "It's increasingly difficult for the public Internet to make progress," he says. The network's infrastructure is fragmented among many thousands of network providers who are committed to the Internet as it is, and who have little motivation to cooperate on making fundamental improvements.

This spectre of a rapidly ossifying Internet has made Turner a champion of data channels known as virtual networks. In such a network the bits of data flow through real, physical links. But software makes it seem as though they are flowing along totally different, fictitious pathways, guided by whatever rules the users desire.

In present-day commercial virtual networks, those rules are just the standard network protocols, says Turner. But it is possible to create virtual networks that work according to totally new Internet protocols, he says, making them ideal laboratories for researchers to experiment with alternatives to the current standards. His group, for instance, is working on virtual networks that enable classes of applications that are not well-served by the current Internet. "This includes person-to-person voice communication, person-to-person video, fast-paced multi-player games and high-quality virtual world applications," he says. "In general, any application where the quality of the user experience is dependent on non-stop data delivery and there is low tolerance for delay."

Moreover, Turner is just one of many researchers pursuing this approach. An academic–industry–government consortium known as PlanetLab has been providing experimental virtual networks on a worldwide collection of computers since 2002. The GENI test bed is essentially a collection of virtual networks, all of which run atop Internet2 and National LambdaRail. This allows the same physical infrastructure to handle multiple experiments simultaneously — including many of the experiments mentioned in this article.

Looking farther down the road, says Turner, as the best of these non-standard, experimental protocols mature to the point of being ready for general use, virtual networks could become the mechanism for deploying them. They could simply be built on top of the Internet's existing, physical infrastructure, and users could start using the new functionality one by one. Different protocols could compete in the open marketplace, says Turner — and the era of the ossified Internet would give way to the era of the continuously reinvented Internet.

February Wallpaper

I kind of made a new wall paper but not really, all I did was took a (cool!) Miku "Chain Girl" image from pixiv and expanded the edges a little through smudging(horizontal pixel size was 1220, my screen size is 1280, dude wtf!!). For that reason I won't go posting it on facebook or anywhere else claiming its mine because I didn't actually do anything...

But I post it here for two reasons:

1. This is a cool wallpaper based off a cool song that Miku did. See previous "Miku Spree" topic.
2. THIS IS A SYMBOLIC INTERPRETATION OF MY LAPTOP RIGHT NOW. At least until I get my new laptop. As you can see, my laptop is an innocent little girl that is very sad and struggling desperately just to open programs for me. For the record it took me almost 30 minutes to take a screenshot, save it, and post it on this blog.

...ITS NOT THE LAPTOP'S FAULT, POOR LAPTOP IS LIKE POOR MIKU, ALL CHAINED UP (most likely with junk that I keep on this computer >.>). At the very least my laptop has a cool wallpaper for now. :(

Katawa Shojo

http://kotaku.com/5461619/romance-with-disabled-girls-how-and-maybe-why-an-unusual-video-game-came-to-be

A good read imo. Also imo, I think in a completely different light, this proves that people in the western world CAN match up to the Japanese in terms of animation/visual novel quality if they wish it to be, which is kind of encouraging in itself.

Science and HorseBetting

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/201/1?rss=1

...Really? Did we really invest hundreds of millions of dollars, years of research... to help people win horse bets? :V