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Hatsune Miku & Piapro Characters General News & Happenings

hamano

ミクさんマジ天使
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Apr 8, 2018
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Sakura Miku serves as the mascot for Hirosaki Sakura Matsuri again in 2021 for the 3rd year in a row. Hirosaki Sakura Matsuri will be held between April 23rd and May 5th.

Today the collaboration illustrations have been revealed, along with Sakura Miku branded treats such as bread, apple juice and jam. See the link for more info:
 

hamano

ミクさんマジ天使
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Apr 8, 2018
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Today the NHK program "Numa ni hamatte kiitemita" had their second Vocaloid special episode aired, this time having Rin and Len appear on the show and perform a live show. Apart from that the featured Vocaloid culture and music in general.


The episode is available to watch for a week, but unfortunately only of you're in Japan

Edit: VocaSphere is doing a good summary on the program contents if you're curious:
Clips from the studio live featuring Rettou Joutou and Rimokon have been uploaded to NHK's Youtube channel
 
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sketchesofpayne

Listening to Hatsune Miku since 2007
Jan 21, 2021
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acaric-miku-poster.jpg
Hatsune Miku named temporary Chief Research Officer (CRO) of Acaric
Acaric is an employment information site. They hold various events for job hunting and career building for science students / graduate students (master's / doctoral) / postdoctoral.

[Translated from article on Wantedly; edited for clarity]:

Why did you decide to do a collaborate with Hatsune Miku?

Since its establishment, Acaric has been providing support services for graduate students and researchers, and has helped many people. We would like more graduate students and researchers concerned with their careers to know that Acaric provides such support, and we want them to use Acaric to have a better career. It is with this in mind that we started this collaborative project.

As a result of our discussions on how to make Acaric known to as many people as possible, we came to the conclusion that we should collaborate with a character who is a symbol of support for researchers.

Please tell us about your thoughts on using Hatsune Miku and her contribution to society.

Hatsune Miku was born from a combination of many scientific technologies, including synthetic voice technology, and from her birth in 2007 to the present, she has made and continues to make an impact in many fields, including music creation. What gave birth to Hatsune Miku is undoubtedly "research," but the graduate students who play a central role in these research activities have been facing a difficult time for many years.

The percentage of students who go on to doctoral programs has dropped significantly, and the number of students who want to pursue research itself is decreasing due to the burden of repaying scholarships and the uncertainty of exits, including employment. Acaric conducts research to solve these social problems, and has appointed Hatsune Miku as a temporary CRO to promote its research, and will continue its activities to brighten the future of researchers.

(compiled with photos from their Official Twitter)
acaric-miku-collab.jpg
During the collaboration, posters have been put up at stations near fourteen universities. Each contains characters for spelling out a scrambled word/name. Submitting the correct solution will let you win limited goods prizes featuring the two collaboration designs (lab coat and hoodie key artworks shown above).
 

Goodeplex

New Fan
Jul 24, 2020
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The percentage of students who go on to doctoral programs has dropped significantly, and the number of students who want to pursue research itself is decreasing due to the burden of repaying scholarships and the uncertainty of exits, including employment. Acaric conducts research to solve these social problems, and has appointed Hatsune Miku as a temporary CRO to promote its research, and will continue its activities to brighten the future of researchers.
So they're researching ways to have more research in the world by helping research students go to school for research and get jobs doing research. Nice.
 
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CdrSonan

Passionate Fan
Sep 12, 2019
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Hopefully it‘s going to help, and it’s exciting to see Miku in such a promotion, but the science world has developed some far deeper issues that can be seen worldwide and don‘t make it very appealing to start a career in.
(Ramble incoming)
Science is becoming ridiculously competitive, all the way between researchers, institutions and journals, and this creates an unhealthy climate where everyone has to deliver results, and nothing else. Journals refuse to publish articles about failures, and this leads to (estimated) several billions of research funds being lost every year because researchers keep repeating the mistakes of other teams. It also means that noone can admit that they were wrong on anything. Theories that are disproven by experiment don‘t get discarded, but only „adjusted“ in minor ways so noone has to admid that the theory was wrong. String theory is a prime example, it has been disproven by experiment three times, but each time, it has been „extended“ by hypothesising more dimensions and more subatomic particles because the careers of too many scientists depend on it. There are newer theories that explain the same phenomena and are far simpler, but they get hardly any attention.

In the end, new ideas are generally just not getting much attention, which you really wouldn‘t expect from science. It‘s extremely frustrating for anyone new to the field, plus you have to make do with ridiculous hierarchies,team members constantly trying to outdo each other, rather poor wages and almost only one-year contracts.

(Sorry that this is pretty off topic and incoherent)

I‘m very glad for the Miku promo, and the work that this group is doing is badly needed. But at the same time, the text just scratches the surface of the problems.
 
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Blue Of Mind

The world that I do not know...
Apr 8, 2018
699
Science is becoming ridiculously competitive, all the way between researchers, institutions and journals, and this creates an unhealthy climate where everyone has to deliver results, and nothing else. Journals refuse to publish articles about failures, and this leads to (estimated) several billions of research funds being lost every year because researchers keep repeating the mistakes of other teams. It also means that noone can admit that they were wrong on anything. Theories that are disproven by experiment don‘t get discarded, but only „adjusted“ in minor ways so noone has to admid that the theory was wrong. String theory is a prime example, it has been disproven by experiment three times, but each time, it has been „extended“ by hypothesising more dimensions and more subatomic particles because the careers of too many scientists depend on it. There are newer theories that explain the same phenomena and are far simpler, but they get hardly any attention.

In the end, new ideas are generally just not getting much attention, which you really wouldn‘t expect from science. It‘s extremely frustrating for anyone new to the field, plus you have to make do with ridiculous hierarchies,team members constantly trying to outdo each other, rather poor wages and almost only one-year contracts.
I know I'm going off-topic now, but speaking as a new research student in History, I can attest that competitiveness/a "sink or swim" attitude is prevalent everywhere in academia nowadays, not just Science or the rest of STEM. The same pressure to churn out new research is sadly also common within the Arts and Humanities, and it's getting to the point where more research students are hopping off the academia train once they graduate and enter non-academic fields which appreciate the transferable skills you get from a PhD. (It doesn't help that in both the UK and the US, there are more PhD graduates around than there are academic jobs. In fact, I've actually seen Reddit posts from Americans telling other Americans to just finish higher education with a Master's and not to go on to a PhD, because there's a very high risk of wasting six years in a graduate school only to not find any job prospects because you'll be overqualified. I think the situation is slightly better in the UK because we only spend three to four years on average on a PhD, but it's not very comforting to me as a Brit.)
 

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