Sunday, October 9, 2011

Mushroom & Statue - Mt. Maruyama

Yesterday went to the reserved forest of Mt. Maruyama, Sapporo. The main purpose is to photography one of my favorite photography subject - mushroom. 
The first time I photography mushroom after owning a macro lens was during my trip at Oirase.
To shoot mushroom, tripod is a must because it usually grow in shaded places which required very low shutter speed - mostly shot at 0.8 second in this series, thus handheld is impossible.
Also, I usually overexposed it by +1 or +1.5 so that the mushroom looks growing.
To make it interesting, approach from law angle so that you are showing its under side of the cap, which should looks growing glowing with back-lighting and a little of overexposed. How I wish my camera has a swivel LCD to make the task easier.
I didn't shoot any top-down picture because it looks dull to me.




Since there weren't much mushroom to shoot, I then started to find these (below) statues to be interesting. 

When you started to pay attention, you'll notice that they have very different kinds of expression.
This one looks jolly to me.

This one looks calm and a little serious.

This looks calm and joyful.
 So as this one.

Calm and humble.

A typical cunning, evil, foxy smiling.

This too, calm and joyful.

Calm and innocent.

Calm and joyful.

There are scattering along the way up to the hilltop of Mt. Maruyama. 
Perhaps counting them will make the way up less tiring when you have something to keep you from thinking about how tire you are. But what if you become tire of counting? Because there are literary more than hundred of them!  
 

My bicycle, parked near the entrance to the walkway up the hill.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Swan - Scientific Writing Assistant

Came across a software called SWAN - Scientific Writing Assistant, which was created to help writers with the content of scientific writing. Eventually I downloaded it and tried it out. This is how it work:
1. Go to this website to download a zipped folder http://cs.uef.fi/swan/download.html

2. After the download, extract it and these are the content:
3. For window users, double click the "Launch_SWAN_(Windows).bat" file and a DOS window (below) will pop open which indicates that your window is launching theSWAN
 4. This is how the welcome message looks like during the 1st launch, you can choose to disable it.
 5. There are tree options, I've chosen "Quick start" for my trial. You simply click on the one you preferred for your evaluation and it will bring you to the next step.
 6. Now, open the file where you keep your manuscript. In my case, I opened a Microsoft Word document. Then all you need to do is simply copy and past the content of your manuscript into the respective column in SWAN.
For "Quick start" option, you only needed the "Title", "Abstract", "Introduction", and "Conclusion" sections.
 7. Then click the "Start Evaluation" button.
 A small window will pops out which shows you the evaluation progress.
 8. In the evaluation results, it gives comments on each of the four sections. The Green (+) sign denotes positive comments, whereas the Red (-) sign indicates areas you 'may' want to take a look and reconsider about your text.
It also provide some statistic about the length and the voice of your sentences. It'll warn you when a passive sentence is found.   
It'll also highlights your words with different colours, to indicate the different word categories found in your text, e.g. imprecise words, judgemental words, transition words, and words in the passive sentences.
In general, I am quite happy with the guidelines given - It'll remind you what are the good things to include in your text and what to avoid. However, a software is still a software, it have advised me to include 'future work' in the conclusion section when the last sentence of my conclusion says 'In addition, further work is required..." - It failed to perceive the meaning of the sentence when different word is used to convey the same message.