Photo Attribution: Helgi Halldórsson
From Susanne Tak and Alexander Toet comes "Color and Uncertainty: It is not always Black and White" which finds that:
'A 'traffic light' configuration (with red and green at the endpoints and either yellow or orange in themiddle) communicates uncertainty most intuitively. '
A video presentation is also online.
As noted on lines 23 and 24 in column 4 of the printed version of patent 8,770,625,
the U.S. Patent Office procedure discourages the use of color drawings. This makes Fig. 4 a little hard to visualize for the non color scientist (there are no color figures in Wyszecki & Stiles), so here it is in color (right pane):
The invention is relatively simple. The general field is anti-counterfeiting as it applies to packaging. Professional counterfeiters have no problem faking ordinary measures like serial numbers and holograms, so the trick is to embed information that cannot easily be perceived by a counterfeiter, hence is omitted in the facsimile. Fortunately color does not exist in nature, it is just an illusion happening in our minds. Therefore, all we have to do is to create an illusion you can only perceive if you expect it.
As described in patent 8,770,625, a number computed from the—possibly counterfeited—serial number on the package can be encoded positionally in a tic-tac-toe grid. The marking is just above the visual threshold, so the naive counterfeiter will reproduce the same pattern on all packages. The trained inspector can then quickly assert whether an actual positional code corresponds, for example, to the possibly fake serial number.
Patent 8,770,625 is relatively short with just three claims, but reducing it to practice is a little tricky, even when all the steps are disclosed in the patent. The difficult part is to design the tool to determine experimentally the visual thresholds for the print process being used and the light conditions under which the inspections are expected to happen. You need to be skilled in the art.
The above figure is a screen-shot of that tool. To implement it you need to write a spectral color management system with CIE colorimetry to simulate the press on the display and vision colorimetry to model what the actual human visual system perceives. The details of the controls are explained in patent 8,770,625.
Depending on your viewing conditions, the above color version of Fig. 4 might be under the visual threshold. If that is the case, in the figure below we crank up the saliency and decrease the background coverage, so you will see the encoding for sure. If you have aliasing problems, you can click on the figures to display them at the original resolution in which they were created eight years ago, early July 2006 (time flies).
"BIRD PARK 8 0189" by Loke Seng Hon (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons
Charles Darwin ventured that the magnificent trains on male peacocks, which feature ornamental eyespots called ocelli, evolved because of sexual selection. He speculated that there was a single origin, which sexual selection then enhanced. A new genetic study of peacocks and closely related pheasants found that this trait appears in some birds but not others, which suggests that it independently evolved repeatedly.
Article: Keping Sun, Kelly A. Meiklejohn, Brant C. Faircloth, Travis C. Glenn, Edward L. Braun, and Rebecca T. Kimball: The evolution of peafowl and other taxa with ocelli (eyespots): a phylogenomic approach. Proc. R. Soc. B September 7, 2014 281 1790 20140823; doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.0823 1471-2954
Viewing another woman in red increases perceptions of sexual receptivity, derogation, and intentions to mate-guard.
Research has shown that men perceive women wearing red, relative to other colors, as more attractive and more sexually receptive; women’s perceptions of other women wearing red have scarcely been investigated. Adam D. Pazda, Pavol Prokop and Andrew J. Elliot hypothesized that women would also interpret female red as a sexual receptivity cue, and that this perception would be accompanied by rival derogation and intentions to mate-guard. Experiment 1 demonstrated that women perceive another woman in a red, relative to white, dress as sexually receptive. Experiment 2 demonstrated that women are more likely to derogate the sexual fidelity of a woman in red, relative to white. Experiment 3 revealed that women are more likely to intend to guard their romantic partner from a woman wearing a red, relative to a green, shirt. These results suggest that some color signals are interpreted similarly across sex, albeit with associated reactions that are sex-specific.
Adam D. Pazda, Pavol Prokop, and Andrew J. Elliot: Red and Romantic Rivalry: Viewing Another Woman in Red Increases Perceptions of Sexual Receptivity, Derogation, and Intentions to Mate-Guard. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 0146167214539709, first published on July 11, 2014 doi:10.1177/0146167214539709
We used to talk about the Silicon Valley, but nowadays it seems more appropriate to talk about that triad comprising San Francisco, the Peninsula, and San Jose. People prefer to talk about the Bay Area, but that includes too much "regular economy" to define correctly the locus of the current gold rush.
The previous gold rush was about the commercialization of the Internet and was called the .com boom. Today's rush is nicknamed Web 2.0, but it is much less of a technology rush. While .com came after the end of the cold war and the end of research labs spilling redundant scientists and researchers to fill the cubicles of technical entrepreneurs, Web 2.0 is much more about business.
The analogy is with patents. Gold diggers take an old business idea, add the word computer, get a patent, then sue the incumbents for patent infringement and get away with plenty of dollars.
In the real economy, the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs come up with an idea for a service that can be implemented on the Web. Today's various cloud providers make this very cheap and simple. The monetization consists in giving the impression that the service is free. In reality, the customers are used to crowd-source information by coaxing them to provide detailed information about themselves. This information can then be sold to one of the more than a thousand personal information brokers operating in the USA.
Recently, companies have been valued at up to $100 per customer, which is very high. Accordingly, investors are poring billions of dollars into this area. Because this is gambling and speculation, the amount of money is not a good indicator of the real economy here.
I tried to look at a more conventional technology, namely the storage industry. My data is just accumulated from press releases and is not authoritative nor complete, because I have not gathered it systematically. However, here it is:
On the abscissa we have funding dates, categorized by quarters. On the ordinate we have companies related to storage (my apologies for mistakes). Each point is an investment round. The diameter represents the accumulated funding so far of the company. You can click on a ball to see the details.
When there is a long horizontal line of regularly spaced balls of the same diameter, the start-up is not really taking off. When the diameter is rapidly increasing, the company is getting a lot of interest from the investors.
We see that as we move forward in time, many more companies are getting funded and some companies are real winners. This is a good sign, because it means that investors are not just gambling their money on social network companies but also investing in the nut and bold technologies that allow for a healthy sustainable future-oriented economy.
When we think about places we have never visited, we build on other information about the place—the stereotypes—we have gained from variou...
