Anime Content and Its Effects

A lot of people today know at least something about Anime. Some may refer to it as Japanese Animation, while others may say that they're cartoons that look a lot better than American toons. Well, both of those appear to be correct if you ask the majority of Anime fans out there. Anime has been around for a long time and it is definitely blossoming everywhere across the world. Since this has been in effect, Anime on the internet has been expanding as well.

According to the Internet age early in the 1990s, Anime was slowly approaching to its fans diversely across the web. Different websites were made to display different Anime series by giving the visitors content to come back for. Around this time, Anime fans were more into searching for their favorite Anime series and finding media such as images and screenshots from the specific shows that they watched and enjoyed. Inspired by Japanese Animation, these fans were verily into drawing their own Anime pictures. When this trend vastly became popular, fans began to submit their Anime fan art to websites, so that others can view their work. This, however, was only its starting point as Anime started to reach out to thousands of people.

After 1995, amassed Anime shows from Japan had entered the television networks of America. Popularly known cable television channels such as Sci-Fi, Cartoon Network's Toonami, WB, and FOX took part in this new revolution and millions of Anime fans started to watch their very own Anime programs! Primarily, these television networks aired shows such as the popular Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, and Gundam Wing. But as the numbers watching Anime in the nation grew to a certain point, even more shows were available to the fans. Once again, it all came back to the Internet as an evolved form.

Movie clips and other multimedia became broadly accessible to the public now. Fans started downloading countless of video clips based on their favorite Anime series. Soundtracks and albums were also out, along with DVDs that can be purchased online and in stores everywhere. This "age" of Anime content on the web lasted quite a few good years until, of course, the modern days of Anime kicked in. This period of time is what I refer to as "Unlimited Anime", meaning that there is basically no limit to what sources have to offer in the field of Japanese Animation.

Finally it happened. Fans can now download full episodes of numerous Anime series, with no strings attached. But this doesn't mean that just anybody can download full episodes, because you had to have met the minimum requirements. This condition means that the person who wishes to download this content has to generally have the original DVD of that particular Anime series. So if users that download Anime full episodes don't have DVD copies of the series, the website isn't responsible for their actions. A website offering this type of content to Anime fans normally has a Terms & Policy statement, which elucidates all possible rights and wrongs, stated on a portion of their website. These webmasters let their visitors download full episodes by either direct linking to the URL, uploading it as a zip or compressed file onto a P2P network, or submitting it as a BitTorrent media, which is by the way the latest method used today.

I host an Anime website, by the name of DJ's Anime, that basically presents this major Anime multimedia to the public. You can view my website at "http://djs-anime.uni.cc/" and view the Anime content that I offer. It's currently a new project of mine and will soon expand to a much larger audience.

I was born on May 7, 1988 in India. I came to America at an early age for education and a better future. I currently live in Orange Park, FL of North America. I'm in high school right now and being a webmaster is what I do at home on the internet. I have mastered HTML and other languages that are necessary to know when designing websites. I have made several successful websites online and each time, my knowledge reaches a new height. I am concentrating on web marketing for my website by taking part in several affiliation programs in order to gain traffic and possibly towards making money.

Scrumptious Food in Sin City

Whenever I pay a visit to Singapore, there are a few types of food that are considered must-have for me. The shops or stalls are all within walking distance from the place that I was putting up, so it was a convenient a convenient lip smacking spree for me.

My first breakfast on my recent trip to Singapore was the lor mee (卤麵) at a coffee shop near the North Bridge Road Market & Food Centre. The boss there could recognise me 3 years ago after I had left Singapore for 6 years. It was no difference for this time that he said he waited me for ages in Mandarin (痴痴的等)!

The stall doesn't have a special name but is just called Chia Bee Lor Mee (正味卤麵) which literally means authentic brine-soaked noodles. Liking lor mee is an acquired taste. Many people do not like it when they first tasted it, but I'm loving it more after each bowl! The addition of the black vinegar makes it even more delectable.

On that same evening, I went to look for this place that serves very delicious clay-pot rice at the Golden Mile Food Centre along Beach Road. I had had it many times during my studies in Singapore but I would go back for more.

The name of the stall is just 76 Golden Mile Clay-pot Rice (76 黄金砂煲饭), but the food it serves is fantastic! The way to eat it is to add the sweet black soy sauce and a few drips of oil on the chicken and sliced preserved sausage and they are mixed thoroughly before scooping them into a plate.

The rice at the bottom part of the clay pot has to go through the same treatment before tucking in. I particularly like the rice sticking at the bottom of the clay pot. Yummy!

On the next morning, I went to the North Bridge Road Market & Food Centre to feed myself with the stuffed tofu at the stall called Lao Huang Hakka Niang Tou Fu (老黄客家酿豆腐). Other than stuffed tofu with minced pork and salted fish, there are many other stuffed vegetable as well such as brinjals and bitter gourd. The noddles with minced pork is optional but I always had the stuffed stuff with a plate of it.

In fact, Golden Mile Food Centre has a lot of scrumptious food on offer. There is a stall at the basement of the food centre, also with a simple name called Golden Mile Fried Kuay Teow Mee (黄金炒粿条麵), serving very delicious fried kuay teow (ribbon rice noodles) and noodles. Although the ingredients used are just very simple, i.e., sliced pork and preserved sausage, cockles and eggs, the owner insists on frying every plate of rice noodles or noodles separately. It is said that he has used up one million chicken eggs along the way! Squeezing the fresh lime juice on the fried noodles really brings out the fragrance a lot.

As for dessert, I like the stuffed glutinous rice balls that can be found at the Golden Mile Food Centre also. There are five types of fillings: ground peanuts, red-bean paste, yam paste, black-sesame paste and green tea.

Only the ones with green tea fillings come in green. The rest are white in colour. When served in peanut soup, they are just heavenly!

Arrowette

Arrowette is the name of two fictional superheroes in the DC Comics universe. The first character is the mother of the second.

Miss Arrowette


Bonnie King debuts as Miss Arrowette in World's Finest Comics #113.
Publication information
Publisher DC Comics
First appearance World's Finest Comics #113 (November 1960)
Created by Lee Elias (art)
In-story information
Alter ego Bonnie King

The first Arrowette (properly known as Miss Arrowette) is Bonnie King, a would-be sidekick and general nuisance to Green Arrow. She first appears in World's Finest Comics #113 (November 1960).

When Bonnie was a child, her mother Millie put her to archery training, controlling her progress all the time. She turns out to be very good and even goes to the Olympic Games, where she wins a Bronze Medal. Millie, though, had expected a Gold, argued with her daughter over her alleged failure. After that, Bonnie abandoned both home and archery. She never talked to her mother again.

Alone in Star City, she eventually becomes inspired by Green Arrow and Speedy and decides to use her skills in a way that counted. She makes a costume for herself and officially becomes Miss Arrowette. She carries trick arrows such as the Powder Puff Arrow. After that, she helps both archers a few times, even when they did not want her to. Bonnie turns out to be too clumsy to become a hero and too vain to wear a mask. Bonnie briefly dates Green Arrow in his civilian identity of Oliver Queen, as shown in Justice League of America #7 (October-November 1961).
The adult Bonnie King appears in Young Justice.

At some point, she meets journalist Bernell "Bowstring" Jones, who remembers her from the Olympic Games and is probably the only human being to consider her a star. She nicknames him Bowstring because he is as thin as one and takes him briefly as her sidekick so he will give her publicity in his journal. Finally, Green Arrow asks her not to help them anymore.

She has to permanently leave archery because of carpal tunnel syndrome in her wrists, and also due to her job as a secretary. She talks Bowstring into marrying her and, one year later, she has a daughter named Cissie King-Jones. When Bowstring dies five years later from fish poisoning, Hal Jordan (working as an agent for the company that holds Bowstring's life insurance policy) gives Bonnie and Cissie the policy's beneficiary check; the money enables Bonnie to turn Cissie into a superhero. Cissie hardly has time to breathe between lessons of archery, judo, kick-boxing, gymnastics, ballet, and many other fields, and comes to resent her mother deeply.

Bonnie's name is a parody or play on Green Arrow's civilian name, Oliver Queen.

Arrowette


Arrowette, by Todd Nauck
Publication information
Publisher DC Comics
First appearance Impulse #28 (August 1997)
Created by Tom Peyer
Craig Rousseau
In-story information
Alter ego Suzanne "Cissie" King-Jones
Team affiliations Young Justice
Abilities Arrowette is an Olympic-level archer.

Forced by her mother to adopt a version of her old costume, Cissie King-Jones becomes the second Arrowette. Arrowette first appears in the pages of Impulse wearing a frilly costume and a bejeweled mask that apes her mother's old costume. Despite Arrowette's success as a heroine, Impulse's mentor, Max Mercury, is concerned by what he sees as Bonnie's exploitation of her daughter. Child Welfare Services gets involved, and Bonnie loses custody of her daughter, who is sent to the Elias School for Girls, a boarding school.[1]

Arrowette next appears in Young Justice #4 wearing a more practical costume. Acting alone, she battles the villainous Harm and is injured by him with one of her own arrows. However, she manages to escape and contact Young Justice, later joining the team, along with the second Wonder Girl (Cassie Sandsmark) and Secret (Greta). The three quickly become close friends.
Cissie King-Jones appears in her original Arrowette costume.

After her school therapist - one of the few adults whom Cissie trusted - is brutally murdered, Cissie tracks down the killers in a violent rage. She nearly kills one of them herself, but is stopped by Superboy. Cissie is so shaken by the incident that she vows never to be Arrowette again.

Despite leaving the team Cissie remains close friends with her teammates, and eventually reconciles with her mother, who convinces her daughter to try out for the "Summer Games" in Sydney (a thinly veiled reference to the 2000 Summer Olympics, due to DC not being an "official partner" of the Games). With her battle-honed abilities, Cissie ends up taking home the gold, and becomes something of a celebrity, guest-starring on Superboy's favorite TV show, "Wendy the Werewolf Stalker" (a parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). She helps the Red Tornado's daughter, Traya, adjust to life at Elias and later, when Secret was returned to humanity, Cissie helps to organize a placement for her at the same school.

Now retired from superheroics, Cissie never expresses any desire to return to her life as a superhero, despite the best efforts of several of her former teammates. They even involve her in a baseball game on an alien planet, with the fate of many innocents riding on the outcome. Cissie is enraged because they chose her instead of many other superhumans, but she participates as best as she can. Her team barely wins. Cissie still remains committed to justice and compassion. During the Imperiex war, she served as medical aid volunteer, again working with Young Justice.[1]

Cissie made a brief appearance in Teen Titans (v3) #7 when Helen Sandsmark attempts to enroll Wonder Girl into the Elias School (which seems to have expanded its student body to boys as well as girls). With Greta Hayes (formerly Secret), the girls threaten to leave the school and take Cissie's celebrity status as a gold winning archer with her, if Wonder Girl is not allowed to enroll. The school gives in to her demands. Cissie makes a second appearance in Teen Titans and Outsiders Secret Files 2005, joining Wonder Girl on a trip to San Francisco, California. Cissie wishes to give her best friend moral support as Cassie battles with the decision to tell her friends that her father was the Greek God, Zeus. At the funeral for her former YJ teammate, Bart Allen, she is mentioned in passing during a video made by Bart prior to his death. Cissie also makes a flashback cameo in Teen Titans #50.

Cissie was last seen hanging out with Cassie and Anita in Wonder Girl #2, now sporting short hair. She is seen again in "Wonder Girl #3" with Anita, as the they help Cassie realize that she has truly gotten over Superboy's death. For the first time since 'retiring' from super-hero work in the pages of Young Justice, Cissie wears a new Arrowette costume that resembles the second one to aid Wonder Girl rescue her mother in Wonder Girl #4.

Skills and abilities

Cissie is a normal human with above average strength, stamina and agility for a girl of her age. She has exceptional hand to hand combatant ability with skills as an Olympic gold-medalist longbow marksman and possesses above average intelligence.

Pretty Green Lies

The British government has a novel approach to public health advertising: flat-out, obvious lies. This is really the only way to describe this:



The message is that when you're on drugs, anyone looking at you can tell, because drugs make your eyes look funny. So if you're driving while under the influence, the police will know. By looking at your eyes. So, don't.

This is not true. It's obviously not true. Anyone who's ever seen someone on drugs will know that they don't cause your eyes to become the size of golfballs - the advert uses image morphing to make the eyes enormous, as explained in the Making Of clip:


Some drugs do have subtle effects on the eyes, such as pupil dilation, but you can only spot this if you're staring someone right in the face from about six inches away. Not to mention that anyone who's used a car will know that drivers don't spend their time examining the eyes of their fellow road users.

There's one very good reason why you shouldn't drive on drugs, which is that you might crash and kill yourself or someone else. Why the Department of Transport didn't use this as the basis of their advert, only they know. As it is, they've ended up with something that absolutely no-one is going to take seriously - see the YouTube comments. When YouTubers are making incisive criticisms of your campaign, you know you're doing something wrong.

[BPSDB]

DareDevil

Daredevil is one of the powerful superhero characters and powerful despite the fact he's blind but he could see when she wears her costumes, and especially if it is not superhero if you can not eradicate evil on earth continue to follow this blog and get many other stories super hero .. .




By : Lupus

Dazzler

Dazzler (Alison Blaire) is a Marvel Comics superhero, associated with the X-Men. She first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #130 (February 1980).

A mutant with the ability to convert sound vibrations into light and energy beams, Dazzler was originally developed as a cross-promotional, multi-media creation between Casablanca Records, Filmworks, and Marvel Comics until the tie-ins were dropped in 1980. The character was created by a committee of Marvel staff, principally writer/editor Tom DeFalco and illustrator John Romita, Jr.

Despite the fact that Dazzler was originally commissioned as a disco singer, the character shifted to other musical genres, including rock and adult contemporary. She starred in a self-titled solo series in the early 1980s which lasted 42 issues, a Marvel Graphic Novel titled Dazzler: The Movie, a 4 issue limited-series co-starring Hank "The Beast" McCoy titled Beauty and The Beast, and later joined the cast of the X-Men. She was briefly a member of the spin-off group Excalibur but now has re-joined the X-Men.

A dazzler is a type of a directed-energy weapon employing intense visible light, usually generated by a laser (laser dazzler). It is a non-lethal weapon intended to cause temporary blindness or disorientation. The first reported use of laser dazzlers in combat was by the British, during the Falklands War of 1982, when they were fitted to various Royal Navy warships in order to hinder low-level Argentinian air attacks.[1][2] Blinding weapons are banned by 1995 United Nations Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. Dazzlers are not intended to cause permanent blindness, therefore are thought to be able to skirt this regulation.

Narrowband optical filters tuned to the frequency of the laser used may provide a good defense against laser dazzlers. On the other hand, the dazzlers may employ lasers using more than one wavelength, or tunable lasers with wider range of output. Photochromic materials capable of becoming opaque under high light energy densities may provide protection as well. Non-linear optics techniques are being investigated as well; eg. vanadium-doped zinc telluride (ZnTe:V) can be used to construct electro-optic power limiters capable of selectively blocking the intense dazzler beam without affecting the weaker light from the observed scene.

Optionally they can operate in infrared when their targets are electronic sensors. Most of the contemporary systems are man-portable, and operate in either red (a semiconductor laser) or green (a DPSS laser) part of the spectrum.

Some searchlights are bright enough to cause permanent or temporary blindness and have been used to dazzle the crews of bombers during World War II. Handgun mounted lights may also be used to temporarily blind an opponent and are sometimes marketed for that purpose. In both cases the primary purpose is to illuminate the target and their use to disorient is secondary.

Superheroes Have Saved the World

Over the years many superheroes have captured our attention to entertain and amuse through many forms of media, from their original comic books to the big budget film adaptations.

The Superman character first made an appearance in Action Comics in 1938, he was born on the planet Krypton, was sent to Earth on a rocket by his father, who was a scientist, moments before the planet of Krypton was destroyed. Arriving on Earth, Superman was found, and adopted by a Kansas farmer and his wife and was raised as Clark Kent. From a very early age he developed super human abilities and as he grew up he used his powers to the benefit of others on Earth. Clark Kent assumed Superman's secret identity and worked for the Metropolis newspaper the Daily Planet as a reporter where he worked closely with Lois Lane his co-worker with whom he becomes romantically attached.

Batman first appeared in Detective Comics in 1939. Batman's secret identity is Bruce Wayne who after the murder of his parents, sets himself on a mission to fight crime in Gotham City with Robin. Batman is involved in a continual fight against the Joker and other villains.

Spider-man originated in 1962 and is one of the most popular superheroes. After a bite from a spider exposed to radiation, Peter Parker gains super powers enabling him to become superhuman with the ability to cling to walls. He becomes extremely intellectually advanced with superhuman powers to fight evil.

The Hulk first appeared in 1962 and is one of Marvel Comics most famous characters. The Hulk was born after Dr Bruce Banner the physicist was inadvertently exposed to the radiation from the blast of a gamma bomb. When converted to the Hulk, Banner gains immense strength and his strength increases as his anger increases. The Hulk is often pursued by the armed forces and the police.

Iron man first appeared in 1963 and originated from Marvel Comics. Iron man was Anthony (Tony) Edward Stark who created for himself a suit of power armor which was laden with sophisticated technological devices to make him so powerful. He was involved in the fight against communism, terrorism and corporate crime.

Without these superheroes many would agree the World would not be the place it is today.

Skyline of Singapore After Dark

Location: Singapore
Date taken: 17^th & 19^th August 2009
Camera equipment: Nikon D300 + Nikkor DX 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G

Ultimate Spider Man - The Superheroes Super Game

Flash games have started their reign on the gaming industry and nobody seems to be complaining as they have quite efficiently managed to engage the users with their rich web design and anime appeal. People love to play the Online flash games and they seem to be the next big thing after the 2D and 3D games. These days, gaming portals have incorporated the Flash player to double up the gaming experiences. The Ultimate Spider Man is the recent game which got a Flash makeover.

The Ultimate Spider Man is played on DS gaming console, hence, questions on the clarity and effect of the graphics never arise. The game has most salutary voice work and music and the graphics are mind-blowing. The presentation of the game is extremely appealing to the senses. It actually seems to be reiterating the movie with augmented essence. The recent cartoon 'The Ultimate Spider Man', rendered by CGI, looks like the source of idea of this game. The dialogues are voiced in an extremely professional manner which accounts for an engrossing play. The game coupled with exciting scores builds up the interest.

The cell-shaded polygonal backdrop gives a splendid view and appeal to the game. The well-animated sprites are the perfect mood-boosters in this game. The camera zooms at frequent intervals to give a dramatical glamour to the stunts. It's rather hard to find another game with a better 3D interface.

The viewpoint shifts from spider man to Venom and vice-versa, occasionally. The closer glimpse of the characters reveals the brilliance of the designer. Even microscopic details have been given the appropriate attention. You will never stop praising the master work as even the minute segments are as appealing as the larger ones. There is a remarkable stage in the game in which the two characters race through different parts of a museum. The levels of exhilaration mount to the peak level as the view switches back and forth at the various checkpoints.

U.S. Antidepressant Use Doubled in A Decade

The proportion of Americans using antidepressants in a given year nearly doubled from 5.8% in 1996 to 10.1% in 2005, according to a paper just published: National Patterns in Antidepressant
Medication Treatment, by Mark Olfson and Steven Marcus.

That means about 15 million more Americans were medicated in '05 than a decade previously. A huge increase in anyone's book. But the doubling in antidepressant use is not the only interesting result in this paper. In no particular order, here are some other fun facts -

• Women are twice as likely to use antidepressants as men (female 13.4% vs male 6.7% in 2005); the ratio was the same in 1996. Studies consistently find that Western women are about twice as likely to report suffering from depression and anxiety disorders as men are. But these kinds of studies rely on self-report so this could merely mean that women are more willing to talk about their problems. This data suggests that they also seek treatment about twice as often.
  
• The peak age bracket for antidepressants is 50-64, with 15.5% yearly use. This is more than double the rate in the 18-34 bracket. This surprised me, maybe because of the influence of books like Prozac Nation (tagline - "Young and Depressed in America"). So, it looks like the increasing use of antidepressants is not because younger people, having grown up in the "Prozac Era", are more accepting of them.
  
• Antidepressants are a white thing - 12.0% of whites take them vs. about 5% of blacks and Hispanics. But it would be interesting to see a regional breakdown here. Are blue-state or red-state whites more likely to be medicated?
• Family income was not correlated with antidepressant use, but the unemployed were twice as likely to use antidepressants: 22% in '05. This might be because unemployment is bad for your mental health, or because mental illness is bad for your employment prospects. Or both.
  
• One of the questions in the survey asked people to rate their own mental health. Over 90% of Americans said it as "good", "very good" or "excellent" - including 80% of antidepressants users. This really surprised me, and suggests that these drugs are being prescribed to people who are not, overall, very unwell.
  
• The % of antidepressant users also using an antipsychotic drug rose from 5.5% to 8.9% in 2005. Given that the number of users also doubled, this means the number of Americans using an antipsychotic as well as an antidepressant increased by a factor of more than 3. This is worrying since antipsychotics are generally the worst psychiatric drugs in terms of side effects. While there is evidence that some of the newer antipsychotics can be of use in depression as an add-on to antidepressants, this is controversial and it's not clear that they're any better than the older alternatives, such as lithium.
  

Overall, this report verifies that antidepressant use has risen dramatically over the past several years. This is hardly news, but the magnitude of the increase is still startling.

What makes it especially interesting is that nothing much happened between 1996 and 2005 in terms of new antidepressants. A couple of new SSRIs, such as citalopram, were approved for sale in the US. But these drugs are very similar to Prozac (fluoxetine) which has been around since '87. Remeron (mirtazapine) hit the market in '96, but it's never been nearly as popular as the SSRIs.

So the change was a change in behaviour, a cultural or social phenomenon. For some reason, America decided to take more antidepressants. Books could be written on why this happened, and I hope they will be, because it's an important topic. But here's my personal take: the main reason why people are taking more antidepressants is that the popular concept of "depression" has become more broad. People have become more willing to label their experiences as "depression" and seek medical treatment. The notion that mental illness is extremely common - the one in four meme - is one aspect of this.

Finally, the inevitable caveats. The data here come from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys (MEPS) which were household surveys of "national probability samples of the US civilian noninstitutionalized population". This means that military personnel, the homeless, prisoners, and (presumably) illegal immigrants weren't included. And not everyone agreed to take part; the response rate was 70% in '96 but dropped to 60% in '05. On the other hand, the samples were extremely large (28,000 in 2005).

Olfson M, & Marcus SC (2009). National patterns in antidepressant medication treatment. Archives of general psychiatry, 66 (8), 848-56 PMID: 19652124

Of Carts and Horses

Last week, I wrote about a paper finding that the mosquito repellent chemical, DEET, inhibits an important enzyme, cholinesterase. If DEET were toxic to humans, this finding might explain why.
But it isn't - tens of millions of people use DEET safely every year, and there's no reason to think that it is dangerous unless it's used completely inappropriately. That didn't stop this laboratory finding being widely reported as a cause for concern about the safety of DEET.

This is putting the cart before the horse. If you know that something happens, then it's appropriate to search for an explanation for it. If you have a phenemonon, then there must be a mechanism by which it occurs.

But this doesn't work in reverse: just because you have a plausible mechanism by which something could happen, doesn't mean that it does in fact happen. This is because there are always other mechanisms at work which you may not know about. And the effect of your mechanism may be trivial by comparison.

Caffeine can damage DNA under some conditions. Other things which damage DNA, like radiation, can cause cancer. But the clinical evidence is that, if anything, drinking coffee may protect against some kinds of cancer (previous post). There's a plausible mechanism by which coffee could cause cancer, but it doesn't.

Medicine has learned the hard way that while understanding mechanisms is important, it's no substitute for clinical trials. The whole philosophy of evidence-based medicine is that treatments should only be used when there is clinical evidence that they do in fact work.

Unfortunately, in other fields, the horse routinely finds itself behind the cart. An awful lot - perhaps most - of political debate consists of saying that if you do X, Y will happen, through some mechanism. If you legalize heroin, people will take more of it, because it'll be more available and cheaper. If you privatize public services, they'll improve, because competition will ensure that only the most efficient services survive. If you topple this dictator, the country will become a peaceful democracy, because people like peace and democracy. And so on.

These kinds of arguments sound good. And they invite opponents to respond in kind: actually, legalizing heroin is a good idea, because it will make taking it much safer by eliminating impurities and infections... And so the debate becomes a case of fantasizing about things that might happen, with the winner being the person whose fantasy sounds best.

If you want to know what will happen when you implement some policy, the only way of knowing is to look at other countries or other places which have already done it. If no-one else has ever done it, you are making a leap into the unknown. This is not necessarily a bad thing - there's a first time for everything. But it means that "We don't know" should be heard much more often in politics.

Emotions are Still Universal

Are facial expressions of emotion culturally specific, or universal? For decades, the dominant view has been that they are universal, at least when it comes to a set of "basic" emotions: fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, and disgust.

Darwin was an early proponent of the idea that all humans (and indeed other mammals) display emotions in certain ways; his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is still a very interesting read.

More recently, the universalist view has been closely associated with the psychologist Paul Ekman. In the 1960s Ekman reported that people from diverse cultures, including isolated tribespeople from Papua New Guinea, make similar faces in response to similar situations.

Now, a new paper claims that Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions Are Not Universal. This article has got a lot of media and blog attention, not surprisingly, since at least judging by the title, this is a major upset.

But the paper's findings are rather modest. The authors, Jack et al, took 13 white British and 13 East Asian subjects. The Asians, who were mostly from China, had only been in Britain for about a week, and all subjects reported that they had never lived in, or even visited an "other race" country, dated interracialy, etc.

Subjects were shown pictures of faces and had to pick the appropriate "basic emotion" - anger, disgust, fear, happy, neutral, surprise, and sadness. The faces were of actors posing the emotions, in accordance with Ekman's "FACS" system.

The result was that Western subjects did well on all emotions, but the Asians did less well on fear and digust, as they tended to confuse these two emotions. The authors also used eye-tracking technology to see where the subjects were looking, and found that the East Asians tended to focus on the eyes more while examining the faces, which may explain their differing performance.

This is quite interesting, especially the eye-tracking data (which goes into a lot of detail). But does it justify the conclusion that:

Our data demonstrate genuine perceptual differences between Western and East Asian observers and show that FACS-coded facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how the different facets of cultural ideologies and concepts have diversified these basic social skills will elevate knowledge of human emotion processing from a reductionist to a more authentic representation. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will continue to find themselves lost in translation.

Well, sort of, but the differences found in this study were really rather small. Statistically, the Asians successfully recognized fear and disgust less often than the Westerners. But they still got them right 58% and 71% of the time, respectively, even when the faces were Western; they did better when the faces were Asian. Given that there were 7 options, had they been picking randomly they would only have got 14% right. 58% is still pretty good. The Asians were actually (non-significantly) better at recognizing neutral, surprised, and sad faces.

And the differences notwithstanding, the whole task relies upon the fact that the subjects know the meaning of "happy", "fear", and so forth, and associate them with certain face expressions. The fact that the experiment worked at all shows - as Ekman would predict - that both Westerners and East Asians share an emotional understanding. There appear to be some cultural quirks, but the essential universality of facial emotion still stands.

Jack, R., Blais, C., Scheepers, C., Schyns, P., & Caldara, R. (2009). Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions Are Not Universal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.07.051

The People at Basilique du Sacré Cœur

When I visited Basilique du Sacré Cœur, I saw a model shooting session of an English-speaking photographer and a female model. I observed for a little while until they were comfortable with me coming into the scene to shoot photos of them at work.

I snapped a couple of shots of the model's poses as well but I didn't want to interrupt their shooting session too much. So, I don't have that many photos of the model.

The model is really gorgeous that the photographs taken by her photographer must be stunning.

After observing them for a little more while, I started to look for some other interesting composition. I found this couple gazing at the panoramic view of the city of Paris while looking at the directory interesting.

There was also a street artist performing at the square in front of Basilique du Sacré Cœur at that time. He seemed very friendly to the two ladies who sat down by his side listening to him, so I guess it was alright for me to take a shot.

When I was trying to take more shots of him after the two ladies had left, he stopped playing and scolded me, saying that I was interrupting his performance. I apologised to him but he didn't care and kept on shouting at me while trying to chase me away from the square. I knew I had met with a snobbish French man and ignored him. He then turned to other tourists to unleash his dissatisfaction about me.

One of my photography friends once told me that French people are very rude before I visited Paris. I have to agree with him after my personal encounter with a rude French man. I have also no doubt about this now for the fact that French people have been voted worst tourists in the world. If they themselves are the worst tourists, how can we expect them to treat the tourists in France nicely?

It was after all a bad day for me in Paris also, as I was pick-pocketed in the evening of the same day. Well, these are not my favourable memories but they will stay with me for a very long time!

Andrea Strucker

Baron Strucker instilled his Nazi values in his children.In retaliation for stopping Andreas from raping a woman while on a hunting trip in Africa, Andrea shot Storm (who was powerless at the time)in the head with a rifle and left her for dead. It failed to do much damage and only grazed her.Some time later, Andrea and Andreas attempted (and failed) to assassinate Magneto at his trial for crimes against humanity.Andrea and Andreas continued being low-level villans, occasionally pestering the X-men and various other X-teams with villainous acts such as attempting (and again failing) to kill Banshee and Forge, attempting (and yes, yet again failing) to join the Upstarts by capturing various members of The New Mutants and the Hellions, having a run-in or two with Generation X, Quicksilver, or Gambit, and generally being villainous, but in general, (last time I'll use the word) failing to do much of anything.Recently, Andrea was killed by Baron Heinrich Zemo(the 13th) after she, at least on some level, figured out that he was posing as Citizen V. Andreas, who was being controlled by the Purple Man at the time, flayed off some of the skin from her corpse and preserved it so he could continue to use his powers. It is wrapped around the hilt of his sword.

Ant Man

Ant-Man is the name of several fictional characters in the Marvel Comics Universe. The first Ant-Man, Henry Pym, was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and first appears in Tales to Astonish #35. Since Pym, both Scott Lang and Eric O'Grady have used the name Ant-Man.