There has been much discussion that the United States risks losing its economic competitiveness because of a work force inadequately trained in science (in case you have not noticed, the Swiss Franc has reached parity with the US Dollar!). For us in research this assertion has always been somewhat puzzling, because the US still has the best universities for science and technology.
The end of the year is the time for performance reviews in laboratories across the world. The question is always about the metrics. Managers could use measures like the number of ICC profiles created, the lines of code written, or the ∆E precision improvement in the color transformation algorithm.
We are all familiar with this phrase. From time to time, scientists come up with pictures that are worth more than myriad words. I recently came across one of these images.
We are all familiar with Minard's graph of Napoleon's ill-fated 1812–1813 Russia campaign:
Recently I came across a similarly powerful graphical representation of the ill-fated economic policies of the last half century.
I cannot stop wondering about the capability of the global financial industry. For example, since the beginning of this year, the US stock market index has increased by 50% while the gross domestic product has actually contracted into negative territory. This may be a fluke, but if we average over the larger data pool of the global economy in the past few years, the financial industry has still been able to achieve investment gains of 15% to 20% per annum while the real economy has grown only by 2% to 3%.
Does the financial industry have a perpetuum mobile? Can it defy the second law of thermodynamics? If so, we would be interested. We have a few problems we could cure with a little alchemy, like today's raster imaging processors (RIP) having the carbon footprint of a truck or cloud computing causing global warming even a nuclear winter cannot cool down.
Researchers working in risk management have a lot of data to analyze and explain the phenomenon. They can even predict what will happen in the short term future, but nobody is listening because the data is too dry.
Returning to the topic of pictures worth more than myriad words, I recently came across this graph by Prof. Didier Sornette, which is based on data compiled by Michel Husson. The caption is: The fork between consumption and salaries has continually opened and widened in the last 28 years. The plot shows the contribution of salaries and private consumption to the gross domestic product of USA, EU and Japan.
If you are interested in the raw data, you can download it from here.
Don't know much about photographySo, with apologies to Sam Cooke, I'll give it the old collage try.
Don't know much color dictionary
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know what it means to take a look
But I do know what is Planck times Nu
And I know that if you read me too
What a colorful blog this will be
Conferences are an opportunity to seek clarifications on facts and methods one does not understand well. For example, in my work I do not scale with semantic differentials, so I never looked into some of its subtleties, like the polarity of the scales.
In her proposal for the new AIC study group on the language of color, Lucia Ronchi wrote that the use of the semantic differential (SD) is necessary to compare the application of language and linguistics in the evaluation of the quality of color planned spaces and the prediction of color planning at the site of design.
In this statistical method for estimating people's reactions to stimulus words, one usually proceeds in three steps:
The scales are then used to gather the data from the observers. A semantic differential scale typically looks like this:
This SD is called bipolar because the two extremes are antonyms and the scale is like a line. A unipolar SD is like a half-line or ray starting in this case from good:
where the number indicates the relative strength of the attribute.
I do not know the subtleties of unipolar vs. bipolar SD, but it seems obvious that they cannot be mixed in an experiment. Yet, in papers by Japanese authors, one can easily see them mixed. What is going on?
The AIC conference in Sydney was a good place to find out, because the over 320 delegates came from many different cultures, with the Japanese delegation 40 members strong.
In the Japanese culture, when feelings are be involved, you cannot use a negative attribute. Instead there has to be wiggling room for hesitation, uncertainty, and doubt:
More precisely, in the case of persons and feelings, the 1-dimensional line is not a good model at all. Instead, a Venn diagram is a better representation of socially acceptable discourse:
While there can be a well defined round judgment for a positive term, the antonym has to be broad and fuzzy, so one can hesitate, deflect, and nudge the discourse. The easiest way to accomplish that is to use a unipolar SD.
Hence, if you are estimating an abstract SD, your bipolar scale can extend from good (良い、いい、ii) to bad (悪い、わるい、warui). However, if the SD can pertain to feelings, like for example if you would want to rate this post, you have to use a unipolar scale from good (良い、いい、ii) to non-good (良いない、よくない、yokunai).
My conclusion is, that if you are doing a Western study, you can use bipolar SD, but if you are doing an Eastern study, then for consistency all your SD should be unipolar, so you do not have to worry about feelings.
The difficulty when publishing an Eastern study in a Western language is that to Westerners good and non-good are clear antonyms, while ii and yokunai are not, except they speak Japanese and know about the -nai form. Therefore, it is better to leave out romanizations from papers because they confuse the reader (or the author, as it has happened).
In these difficult economic times, organizing a conference is hard. Most companies have sharply reduced travel and conduct even important business meetings online. Under the circumstances, the organizers of AIC Colour 2009 have done an excellent job. Although many habitués did not attend, the program had a good quality and the invited lectures were truly outstanding.
Since 1973, when Betty Judd proposed to establish an AIC award in memory of her husband, Deane Brewster Judd, to recognize outstanding work in the field of color science, the AIC has been carrying out the process of selection of the recipients for this award every two years. The selection is an arduous procedure that includes nominations by AIC members and analysis of antecedents of the nominees by a Committee composed of previous recipients of the award.
As chairman of the Judd Award Committee, AIC Vice President Berit Bergström informs that the winner of the AIC Deane B. Judd Award 2009 is Dr. Arne Valberg. She can report that they have received four single nominations and one jointly nomination. All nominees have made outstanding contributions to our understanding of colour. Berit Bergström really hopes that they all will continue working in the international colour community for many years to come. The members of the 2009 Judd Award Committee have been: Paula Alessi, Robert Hunt, John Hutchings, Mitsuo Ikeda, Daniel Lozano, Alan Robertson, Lars Sivik, Gunnar Tonnquist and Pieter Walraven. These nine previous winners of the award and past president gave very careful consideration to the nominations.
Arne Valberg was born on December 31st, 1938. Below is an excerpt from his bio sketch as published by the AIC.
Education and positions
Major grants and research projects
From 1968 to 1994
- Joint research projects in vision (psychophysics and electrophysiology) with groups from:
- Univ. of Basle, Switzerland (1974).
- Univ of Freiburg, BRD (1974-1980; B. Breitmeyer and L. Spillmann).
- Max Planck Inst. for biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, BRD (1981-1990, O.Creutzfeldt and B. Lee).
- Univ. of California, San Diego, USA (1973).
- Univ. of Chicago, USA.
From 1994 to present
- Joint research on Low vision with Tambartun Centre for Low Vision Rehabilitation (with P. Fosse) and Univ. of Oslo (J.H. Wold and T. Seim), Norway.
From 1998 to 2001
- Interdisciplinary Program at NTNU, ”Information coding and functional organisation of populations of nerve cells” Together with professors E. Moser and H. Mustaparta.
From 2000 to 2004
- Strategic University Program from Norwegian Research Council, ”Neural mechanisms of sensory functions and memory” (same collaborators as above). Includes one dr. student (I. Rudvin) and one master student (G. E. Nygård).
2002-2006
- Joint project with Brain Research Unit, University of Freiburg on ”Lateral interactions in vision”. Includes one German dr. student.
2002-2006
- EU Concerted Action together with research groups from universities of Tübingen, Manchester and Utrecht. Project title: ”Photoreceptor dynamics in age-related macular degeneration”.
Editor/Author
Publications
During hard economic times and travel hampered by security concerns, it is tempting to try to keep abreast of one's field reading proceedings instead of attending the conferences themselves. However, you then miss two important opportunities.
The first is getting valuable feedback on your research. There is nothing more efficient than presenting your work in a daring and controversial way, because you incite the audience to challenge it. You might be sitting in your cave for years brooding on your problem, chasing down the solution on a wrong path, but at a conference after a 15 minute presentation you may get tips from those that worked on the problem before, and also invaluable feedback on fallacious thought patterns.
The second is serendipity: you may sit on a lawn in front of the conference venue and somebody might strike a conversation with you on a problem you are secretly starting to work on and give you a key lead.
Serendipity may be a passive recreation as the sign suggests, but concomitantly it can also be very potent. I think this is what the sign's author had in mind.
On a Wednesday evening, when the AIC is in session, Sydney Harbour, or more precisely Darling Harbour, may be a good place to be.
Carefully camouflaged in a garden restaurant you may find John and Mary McCann, and they will get you up to speed on the latest research on colour appearance for high dynamic range (HDR) imaging.
And while you join them sitting at their table, on the pier in front of you, you may spot Prof. Jinsook Lee, who heads the newly formed AIC Study Group on Colour Naming.
Thinking of it, boarding that vessel for a tour of the harbour may be a good idea.
In fact, I end up sharing a table with Maud Hårleman, who had presented an interesting paper on Thinking of colour with and without colour words the previous Monday and Anders Nilsson of the Färginstitutet.
Turns out Anders just released two weeks ago a new Web tool called NCS Navigator that allows you to explore NCS with a concomitant 3-dimensional view and a 2-dimensional projection. We had an interesting discussion on the suitability of various programming languages for implementing colour tools.
On my side of the table were Paul Green-Armytage and Harald Arnkil.
With Paul I had a long discussion about research on colour naming. For his dissertation he embarked to solve the same colour naming problem Nathan Moroney had, but he took a top-down approach instead of Nathan's bottom-up approach. After years of research, it is invaluable to be able to compare the two research approaches.
With Harald I had a discussion on Nathan's paper research he blogged yesterday. Turns out a colleague of his has worked on it for years and he was able to give me invaluable pointers.
In all, it has been a very productive evening.
When we think about places we have never visited, we build on other information about the place—the stereotypes—we have gained from variou...
