HAKUMEI

well this is an unusual concept. VY1 (I'm not sure if I mentioned this before) is a characterless vocaloid, therefore does not have its own icon. Supposedly its supposed to be genderless too (ie can be male or female). When it first came out, I (and probably many other people) listened to a few songs but were pretty disappointed; I basically thought it was pretty much a miku clone.

I canNOT say the same for this song.

There is still some semblance to Miku, but definitely whoever made this song put out the full potential of VY1, which is supposed to be a "professional" VOCALOID (not that the others aren't professional... well, whatever that word means anyway). Props to convincing us the potential of VY1, just like MeltDown presented the potential of Rin (which, btw, I am not very satisfied with any other Rin song beside that one, which is really disappointing).

Also, this song has been going up the charts slowly and surely, which is actually kind of neat. Sort of like, the underdog pushing through the chart full of Mikus? :V

EDIT: I need to make an additional comment about the character presented in this song "Oniko". Apparently its a supposed moe representation of the Chinese insult "Japanese Devils", which is the otaku counter to the growing Chinese/Japanese tensions. :/ While I do appreciate the song itself to be quite a masterpiece, I don't think the Japanese fanbase should take something like this in such a light fashion, especially since there's a reason why Chinese are typically so rather hateful to the Japanese with references to the past. Perhaps I am just young and not understanding, but I can say "bygones be bygones" and acknowledge what happened in the past, yet also acknowledge what is different now. However, people like these really need to learn WHY such a statement came up to being in the first place (it might be more of a government censoring problem though) and not just make a play on words on such sensitive topics.

On the other hand, the Chinese might need to loosen up their hatred, since hatred really doesn't get anywhere imo. I think the Chinese have been doing that already though I can't say for sure.

Although... if China Extremists are going to hate Japan, don't freakin fall through your devotion just because a 14 year old girl with larger-than-usual chests was crying, "Don't hate Japan ;o;". Which happened. That in itself gives them an excuse to make something like this. -_-;;

tl;dr song is nice content is questionable.

EDIT2: additional info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinomoto_Oniko

Daydreaming

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/11/daydreaming-is-a-downer.html

Oi, I don't think I'm being more depressed and I'm one that tends to stray from my mind every single day... Well, I do see in cases that I will feel like I have nothing to do at times but that's usually more associated with the fact that I'm sitting in front of a computer, imo, which seems to distract me and make me forget what I was going to do a lot of the time.

I personally believe its an issue of idleness and having nothing to do rather than actual daydreaming. If my mind is wandering while I'm doing a hard problem on my homework, I don't think I come back depressed afterwards... :V

ネリネ

OH THE CUTENESS

THE CUTENESS IT KILLS


THE CUUUUUUUUUUUUTENESSSSSS

Banshee

Hello.

*Uhuu... Uhuu...*

What is your name?

...I do not have a name... *uhuu... uhuu...*

Why are you crying?

I am crying because it is sad... *uhuu...*

Sad? What is sad?

It is sad... everywhere is sad... *uhuu...*

...I do not understand what you mean.

*uhuu...* the world is full of sadness... but the world cannot feel it. The world cannot afford to feel it... so I do in its place...

Sadness, as in...?

Pain...despair... death. Everyone feels sad when it happens to them. Everyone feels sad when it happens to others too... but only those close by notice, and only for so long...

Everyone feels sad? I still do not understand what you mean.

When one is hurt everyone feels sad. Especially in death. The ripple of those lost spreads throughout, no matter how small. But though everyone is sad in their hearts, they see it not in their minds.

I am the one that cries in place of everyone... *uhuu... uhuu...*

Everyone...?

The man involved in the traffic accident... the disease-struck child in the impoverished land... the victim of an unfair homicide... and the murderer being executed for justice... *uhuu... uhuu..*

And you cry for all of them? For all of us?

We are sad. Everyone is sad, but if everyone knew it they would not live. They could not live. So I stay... here... crying... *uhuu... uhuu...*

Why do you do this...?

*uhuu... uhuu...*

Why not happiness? There is lots of happiness in the world, why not feel joy instead?

Joy... everyone has joy... everyone has sadness... but everyone cannot feel both at the same time... everyone wants joy, so I will take away their sadness...

But... what about your joy? Your happiness?

*uhuu... uhuu...*

You will keep doing this... forever?

*uhuu... uhuu...*

...Who will cry for you?

*uhuu... uhuu...*

繰り返し一粒

Figures I find a good VOCALOID song right when I need to sleep.

I'll comment more on this later. Maybe.

EDIT: It was cool. :V

Holograms

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101103/full/news.2010.579.html

I like how my first thought to this is, "What will Japan do with this kind of technology?!?!??!"

Virtual 3D dancing Miku where we can see all around! HURRAY

Remember that one Nature article with the emphasis on coding in scientific fields?

Someone sent in a letter in response:

===========

As a microbiologist who has published work based on in-house computer code, I empathize with the laments in your News Feature (Nature 467, 775–777; 2010). However, its emphasis on more training for scientists and students fails to consider a downstream issue — retaining the talent afterwards.

From personal experience, there is a common perception that computational analysis is just a tool to enable 'real' discoveries on the bench. Hence, there is little incentive to brush up on computer-related skills. A few graduate students from my laboratory have invested time and effort to become respectable programmers, despite their lack of a background in computer science, but they became disillusioned when they found that their hard work was considered to be of secondary importance to the science.

These talented individuals have since left for careers in finance, management and information technology, where the same programming know-how and problem-solving skills are highly appreciated. They now enjoy shorter hours, comparable pay and greater job security than a tenure-track assistant professor.

The corollary of Nick Barnes's observation in World View that “most professional computer software isn't very good” (Nature 467, 753; 2010) is that good programmers — regardless of their scientific background — are in demand everywhere. Teaching programming skills and best practices to scientists may indeed improve the quality of software, but the software in question might not necessarily be for scientific research.


============

Hmm. Makes me wonder where my future will be. Assuming that I'm good enough to be a programmer in the first place... V:

カタハネ

So, I think there some Rin and/or Len songs of similar style to this, and they reached #1. I personally think this has better voicing and just as good style, why is this at max only reaching 135? D:

GUMIIIIIIII D:

Liaison

Haven't been paying too much attention to GUMI lately, shame on me.

Apparently a lot of her recent popular songs don't appeal to me. On the other hand, this song isn't that popular though I think deservedly it should be. It's not the best, but it has a pretty nice melody. And pretty pictures. Clearly that's important.

Electrical Stimulation to Improve Arithmetic Skill

I prefer a more science-sounding title instead of "Zap your brain to get better at number crunching"... which is basically what they say and seems like basically what its about. :V

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/11/brain-zaps-improve-math.html

PIKACHU used THUNDERSHOCK!!
It's super effective!!
Ash's MATH SKILLS has LEVELED UP!!!

まるくなる

The "whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat" video of the day. I really wouldn't have posted this just because of the song because I don't think the song seemed that great, but uh... as you watch the video, I'm sure you'll understand.


"Ma Ru Ku Na Ru" is some title that I do not know what it means. CUE GOOGLE TRANSLATE

"Be Round" Right. V:

Where is my round GUMI?!?!?

夢、時々…

The new #1 hit for today. Quite a good song, very deserving to be in the top ranking. So mellow, so peaceful...makes me think everything will be alright... (probably not true)

Dream... from time to time...

Ore no Imoto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai

Short post, I think, because I just happened to have my blogger account open and with nothing much else to do, and I just finished reading the first volume. Possibly a stop before heading to NicoNico or pixiv :V

Oddly enough I think the main character in this novel is remarkably cute, in spite of her aggressive tsundereness which is usually something I dislike immensely. I can attribute this to two things: her secretive otakuness, with a big emphasis on secretive, and her otherwise mature appearance. I think this is similar to why I liked Nogizaka Haruka except of course Nogizaka Haruka has the ADORABLE MOE personality as well.

I find that while outright otakuness is not much different from fanaticism and not that appealing in general, the "I have a secret hobby that I'm ashamed of and I don't want people to know about it" blush seems remarkably cute. Maybe its because its a relatable feeling? I find that many characters, despite their personalities, can become cute by just adding this simple trait to them. Of course most of them are otaku so that people watching can easily relate to them, but I think it doesn't necessarily have to be anime and manga; it could be any other hobby and it would be just as cute.

But probably, it would not work as well since anime and manga is sort of the "stigma" which everyone criticizes in society. Well, maybe drugs, but that's not something people easily blush and act cute about... I think. V:

The other thing is maturity. Her tantrums are definitely not mature, but I think due to her aura, her general appearance, and the fact that she knows how to ACT mature when she's in the right situation, she can make up for her random RAGE acts which of course occur throughout the story. Visually wise her character design is very cute, and so with the "I have a secret" personality this makes Kirino a very attractive character. The tantrums by this point seem a bit less noticable, and can probably be attributed to the standard "oh I have a bratty sister" situation but like I already said, since her physical standing and appearance seems alright, and since the "secret" personality trait is there... she turns out to be quite a cute character.

Other potential characters I'd like to know more about is probably the goth loli girl.... well that will see if any more light novels are getting translated. :x

As for other chars.... two meganes, they are so boring. In fact one appears to be made to be boring. :( And the main brother is a jerk, but at least redeems his brotherness at the end of the novel.

Moe Sake

http://kotaku.com/5673326/yes-this-man-was-prime-minister-of-japan

Japan, where prime ministers are allowed to advertise for alcohol with pictures of lolis on them.


Well, can't be much worse than the rampant corruption going around our neighborhood politics!

TARARURA

Sometimes the best songs are not on the top of the rankings.

WHAT THE HECK! THIS ONE SHOULD BE NUMBER ONE, NOT THAT DEATH METAL VERSION OF THAT BHUDDIST CHANT! D:

Sweet Devil MMD

So recently, the Miku models in MMD have gotten really cute...

Well, some of their dancing is still questionable. But at least in this one the dancing is pretty good. I don't like the music too much though. Or the miku dolls in the background, as I put it. I guess... they are appropriate for halloween. >.>

There was also "Electric Love", wherein I liked the music a lot more, but thought the dancing was really weird. But, miku was wearing NET STOCKINGS AND THEY WERE REALLY... uh... I believe "hot" would be the appropriate term. V: I'd need to find it again to put it here though.

Protein Folding

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101014/full/news.2010.541.html

One of my ideal jobs was to use computers to simulate or predict the folding of proteins since it was such a hot topic during the day, so I found this pretty cool. I think there are some programs that use PS3s to help determine protein structure?

Regardless, I wouldn't mind working here. :V

Nature News article: Computational Science: Error

This is actually a really good and really important article (at least for people doing the same or similar work as I am) therefore since nature news is pay to view I'm posting their article here. (What's the point of telling everyone this if you can't get to the general public by restricting views?!? :( )

=====

Computational science: ...Error
…why scientific programming does not compute.

Zeeya Merali

When hackers leaked thousands of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, last year, global-warming sceptics pored over the documents for signs that researchers had manipulated data. No such evidence emerged, but the e-mails did reveal another problem — one described by a CRU employee named "Harry", who often wrote of his wrestling matches with wonky computer software.

"Yup, my awful programming strikes again," Harry lamented in one of his notes, as he attempted to correct a code analysing weather-station data from Mexico.

Although Harry's frustrations did not ultimately compromise CRU's work, his difficulties will strike a chord with scientists in a wide range of disciplines who do a large amount of coding. Researchers are spending more and more time writing computer software to model biological structures, simulate the early evolution of the Universe and analyse past climate data, among other topics. But programming experts have little faith that most scientists are up to the task.

A quarter of a century ago, most of the computing work done by scientists was relatively straightforward. But as computers and programming tools have grown more complex, scientists have hit a "steep learning curve", says James Hack, director of the US National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. "The level of effort and skills needed to keep up aren't in the wheelhouse of the average scientist."

As a general rule, researchers do not test or document their programs rigorously, and they rarely release their codes, making it almost impossible to reproduce and verify published results generated by scientific software, say computer scientists. At best, poorly written programs cause researchers such as Harry to waste valuable time and energy. But the coding problems can sometimes cause substantial harm, and have forced some scientists to retract papers.

As recognition of these issues has grown, software experts and scientists have started exploring ways to improve the codes used in science. Some efforts teach researchers important programming skills, whereas others encourage collaboration between scientists and software engineers, and teach researchers to be more open about their code.

A proper education

Greg Wilson, a computer scientist in Toronto, Canada, who heads Software Carpentry — an online course aimed at improving the computing skills of scientists — says that he woke up to the problem in the 1980s, when he was working at a physics supercomputing facility at the University of Edinburgh, UK. After a series of small mishaps, he realized that, without formal training in programming, it was easy for scientists trying to address some of the Universe's biggest questions to inadvertently introduce errors into their codes, potentially "doing more harm than good".

After decades griping about the poor coding skills of scientists he knew, Wilson decided to see how widespread the problem was. In 2008, he and his colleagues conducted an online survey of almost 2,000 researchers, from students to senior academics, who were working with computers in a range of sciences. What he found was worse than he had anticipated1 (see 'Scientists and their software'). "There are terrifying statistics showing that almost all of what scientists know about coding is self-taught," says Wilson. "They just don't know how bad they are."


As a result, codes may be riddled with tiny errors that do not cause the program to break down, but may drastically change the scientific results that it spits out. One such error tripped up a structural-biology group led by Geoffrey Chang of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In 2006, the team realized that a computer program supplied by another lab had flipped a minus sign, which in turn reversed two columns of input data, causing protein crystal structures that the group had derived to be inverted. Chang says that the other lab provided the code with the best intentions, and "you just trust the code to do the right job". His group was forced to retract five papers published in Science, the Journal of Molecular Biology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and now triple checks everything, he says.

"How many fields have been held back, and how many people have had their careers disrupted, because of a buggy program?" asks Wilson.

More-rigorous testing could help. Diane Kelly, a computer scientist at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, says the problem is that scientists rely on "validation testing" — looking to see whether the answer that the code produces roughly matches what the scientists expect — and this can miss important errors2. The software industry relies on a different approach: breaking codes into manageable chunks and testing each piece individually, then visually inspecting the lines of code that stitch these chunks together (see 'Practicing safe software').


Many programmers in industry are also trained to annotate their code clearly, so that others can understand its function and easily build on it. But scientists often lack these communication and documentation skills. Even if researchers lift a whole working code and reuse it, rather than writing their own, they can apply the program incorrectly if it lacks clear documentation. Aaron Darling, a computational biologist at the University of California, Davis, unwittingly caused such a mistake with his own computer code for comparing genomes to reconstruct evolutionary relationships. He had designed the program to work only with closely related organisms, but discovered that an independent group had used it to look at sequences far outside the code's working range.

"It was lucky that I came across it, because their published results were totally wrong, but they couldn't know that because I hadn't clearly documented how my code worked," says Darling. "It's not something that I am proud of, but I am careful to be more clear now."

Slaying the monster

Problems created by bad documentation are further amplified when successful codes are modified by others to fit new purposes. The result is the bane of many a graduate student or postdoc's life: the 'monster code'. Sometimes decades old, these codes are notoriously messy and become progressively more nightmarish to handle, say computer scientists.

"You do have some successes, but you also end up with a huge stinking heap of software that doesn't work very well," says Darling.

The mangled coding of these monsters can sometimes make it difficult to check for errors. One example is a piece of code written to analyse the products of high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The code had been developed over more than a decade by 600 people, "some of whom are excellent programmers and others who do not really know how to code very well", says David Rousseau, software coordinator for the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Wilson and his students tried to test the program, but they could not get very far: the code would not even run on their machines.

Rousseau says that the ATLAS group can test the software only on the Linux operating system at the moment, but is striving to make the code compatible with Mac computers. This is important, he says, "because different platforms expose different types of errors that may otherwise be overlooked".

Some software developers have found ways to combat the growth of monster code. One example is the Visualization Toolkit, an open-source, freely available software system for three-dimensional computer graphics. People can modify the software as they wish, and it is rerun each night on every computing platform that supports it, with the results published on the web. The process ensures that the software will work the same way on different systems.

That kind of openness has yet to infiltrate the scientific research world, where many leading science journals, including Nature, Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do not insist that authors make their code available. Rather, they require that authors provide enough information for results to be reproduced.

The search for Solutions

In November 2009, a group of scientists, lawyers, journal editors, and funding representatives gathered for the Yale Law School Data and Code Sharing Roundtable in New Haven, Connecticut, where they recommended that scientists go further by providing links to the source-code and the data used to generate results when publishing. Although a step in the right direction, such requirements don't always solve the problem. Since 1996, The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking has required researchers to upload their codes and data to an archive. But a 2006 study revealed that of 150 papers submitted to the journal over the preceding decade that fell under this requirement, results could be independently replicated with the materials provided for fewer than 15 (ref. 3).

Proponents of openness argue that researchers seeking to replicate published results need access to the original software, but others say that more transparency may not help much. Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society in London, says it would be too much to ask reviewers to check code line by line. And in his own field of astrophysics, results can really be trusted only in cases in which a number of different groups have written independent codes to perform the same task and found similar results. Still, he acknowledges that "how to trust unique codes remains an issue".

There are signs that scientific leaders are now taking notice of these concerns. In 2009, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council put out a call for help for scientists trying to create usable software, which led to the formation of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) at the University of Edinburgh. The SSI unites trained software developers with scientists to help them add new lines to existing codes, allowing them to tackle extra tasks without the programs turning into monsters. They also try to share their products across disciplines, says Neil Chue Hong, the SSI's director. For instance, they recently helped build a code to query clinical records and help monitor the spread of disease. They are now sharing the structure of that code with researchers who are trying to use police records to identify crime hot spots. "It stops researchers wasting time reinventing the wheel for each new application," says Chue Hong.

“Could your code stand up to attack?”

Another solution is to bring trained computer scientists into research groups, either permanently or as part of temporary alliances. Software developer Nick Barnes has set up the Climate Code Foundation, based in Sheffield, UK, to help climate researchers. He was motivated by problems with NASA's Surface Temperature Analysis software, which was released to the public in 2007. Critics complained that the program, written in the scientific programming language Fortran, would not work on their machines and they could therefore not trust what it said about global warming. In consultation with NASA researchers, Barnes rewrote the code in a newer, more transparent programming language — Python — reducing its length and making it easier for people who aren't software experts to understand how it functions. "Because of the immense public interest and the important policy issues at stake, it was worth taking the time to do that," says Barnes. His new code shows the same general warming trend as the original program.

In the long term, though, Barnes says that there needs to be a change in the way that science students are trained. He cites Wilson's online Software Carpentry course as a good model for how this can be done, to equip students with coding skills. Wilson developed the week-long course to introduce science graduate students to tools that have been software-industry standards for 30 years — such as 'version control', which allows multiple programmers to make changes to the same code, while keeping track of all changes.

Science administrators also need to value programming skills more highly, says David Gavaghan, a computational biologist at the University of Oxford, UK. "There needs to be a real shift in mindset away from worrying about how to get published in Nature and towards thinking about how to reward work that will be useful to the wider community."

Gavaghan now uses the software industry's 'master–apprentice' approach to train graduate students in his lab. New software projects are split up into bite-sized chunks, with each segment assigned to a pair of programmers — one experienced and one novice — who work together on it. "It forces students to become consistent code-builders," says Gavaghan.

Bringing industrial software-development practices into the lab cannot come too soon, says Wilson. The CRU e-mail affair was a warning to scientists to get their houses in order, he says. "To all scientists out there, ask yourselves what you would do if, tomorrow, some Republican senator trains the spotlight on you and decides to turn you into a political football. Could your code stand up to attack?"

EDIT: better formatting.

English Hatsune Miku

http://www.vocaloidism.com/2010/10/11/a-english-version-of-hatsune-miku-in-the-future/

I want to post this just to say

NO NO IT WON'T WORK ITS A WASTE OF MONEY DON'T DO IT CRYPTON :(

I love your Miku and all but she'll be completely useless in English when people have been making her sing engrishlike songs already. Well, except to maybe the small VOCALOID community that I don't think will be able to produce songs as good as Japan... OKAY SOMEONE. IF THIS HAPPENS PROVE ME WRONG.

Also I guess this means I can get a copy and play around with it... and actually know what I'm doing. >.>

モカ

Another song with a nice melody. Append is much love~

"Moka" which I assume means "Mocha"...I think. :V