A color scientist's role

Here are some thoughts about a color scientist's role in society.

When people ask me what I do, I answer "color scientist," with scientist being the subject and color being the object. One reason is that when I just say "color" people ask me fashion or design questions, which I cannot answer because I am not a color consultant. My field is called "color science" and that makes me a "color scientist." But is it not arrogant calling oneself a scientist? After all, I am not wearing a lab coat…

"Scientist" is not a bragging word. It is a qualification that brings with it also social responsibilities. Bertolt Brecht has collected a lot of material on this subject collected in Werner Hecht's Materialien zu Brechts »Leben des Galilei«, so I'll just mention a short conversation I had last night.

Yesterday evening I attended as a guest the Computer History Museum Fellows Awards Dinner and Ceremony. I was cruising the room in which the cocktails were hosted to greet old buddies, when in one group somebody noted how many former or current PARC scientists were in the room, commenting on the huge impact they had in the valley.

Nobody attends the event for the food. There are many restaurants where you get incomparably better food for $500 per person. People attend such event for the air — or better, for what is in the air. Maybe "ether" is a more appropriate word than "air."

When I was working at Canon, I had the problem that my boss kept telling me that at my level I was not allowed to do technical work, that my role was to inspire people. This was a problem for me, because I am not an evangelist, quite the opposite. In fact, at my previous job at PARC, where we tended to work in a team of a talker and a doer, I was much more of a doer than a talker.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now know that my boss at Canon was right — at least in part. When you research as a scientist, you do not sit on a chair and squeeze your brains until a world-changing idea pops out. You can see this best in pharmaceutical research.

The research for new drugs is very expensive, very difficult, and takes a long time for a team of people. With this you would suppose that a successful team then invents the miraculous drug that conquers yet another great disease, while everybody else is surprised and stands in awe. In reality, it is not like this. When you look at the patent awards, you will find out that there is always a small number of different companies that files for the same discovery a few weeks apart.

This is not what you would expect given the duration of the research and the secrecy in which the companies operate.

The explanation is that discoveries are in the air or ether. Discoveries happen when the time is ripe for them, and at that time many people will have the same insight with a time interval of a few weeks or months. Research is very expensive, it is a high risk investment. Timing is everything, otherwise you lose your investment.

Timing means that you need to be be at the right place at the right moment. This is why we are in an expensive location like Palo Alto, just a couple of freeway exits from the Computer History Museum. And this is why we spend $500 for a plate of ravioli — which allows us to get the buzz from the ether, emanating from all those reunited luminaries, before the guys working for the competition get it.

The social responsibility of scientists is put out their antennas and transcieve. You cannot do this kind of visceral networking with LinkedIn. You have to be there. There are no shortcuts, no miracles.

Scientists are like bees. A bee can be a busy bee, a worker bee, etc., but by itself it is not worth much. Wham!!! … and you can wack it out with a newspaper. Try that with a bee hive. The art of managing research is like the art of a bee keeper who has learned to create and groom a bee hive.

You are reading my contribution to society, emanating through the ether from my antenna. And this is where my manager at Canon had it wrong — you need to get your hands dirty and do real work, otherwise there is nothing to transmit and you do not know on which channel to tune in. This is why in the wardrobe separating their offices, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard kept a cart with an oscilloscope, a soldering iron, and small tools.

These days the difficulty is to survive without having your neck broken 24 years later when the job is done, as Dr. Faustus would have told you if his brother in law Mefistopheles had would not have grabbed him first that fatal day in 1539 and illustrated above.

Blog action day: the environment

Today is blog action day and this year's issue is the environment. This blog is on color perception, so I should write about the visual perception of the environment. However, I am not working on complex color and have nothing new and original to write on this. I could brag about all the things HP does for the environment, but you can read that on our Global Citizenship Report site. Instead, I will do something completely different…

Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett were lifelong environmentalists, who bought quite a bit of land for conservation. They even instituted a large well equiped park in the Santa Cruz mountains so employees and their families can enjoy nature. And they really enjoyed inviting all employees to BBQs in their parks.

In particular, Bill Hewlett has a lifelong interest in nature. He has photographed and cataloged hundreds of flowers over the years. A decade ago I asked him to send me a few of his favorites. What I got are photos of some of the most beautiful wildflowers of the Western United States.

My contribution to blog action day is to share these photos and let you reflect on nature's beauty.

California Wild Rose Rosa Californica

Wild rose is one of less than a dozen species of Rose native to California where it occurs in moist sites below 1800 meters mostly west of the Sierra Nevada. The flowers of this species have been used for perfume, jelly, candy, and tea. The hip, or mature fruit rivals oranges for its vitamin C content. Upon removal of the seeds, the small apple-like hips can also be used for making tea or jelly.

Blazing Star Mentzelia Lindleyi

As might be inferred by the common name, this plant produces flowers of a rich golden color. The silky textured petals expand to expose the many stamens that stand upright to form a large tuft in the center of the flower that brushes insect visitors with a generous supply of pollen. Plants of Blazing Star are covered with barbed hairs that cause them to cling to whatever they come in contact with. These plants grow on rocky slopes, coastal scrub, and oak/pine woodlands in California typically at elevations below 800 meters.

Stream Orchid Epipactis Gigantea

Because of its wide distribution in California and western North America generally and its ability to tolerate a wide range of habitats from near sea level to 2600 meters in the mountains, the stream orchid has avoided the threats that so many of its relatives are up against worldwide. This orchid attracts pollinators by mimicking their food choices without providing a true reward. It is pollinated by syrphid flies that are attracted by a floral odor that mimics the "honeydew" fragrance given off by aphids, but the aphids are nowhere to be found in the flowers of this orchid.

Yarrow Achillea Millefolium

Yarrow is widely distributed in most countries of the northern hemisphere. Its finely divided fernlike leaves and flat-topped or umbrella-like clusters of flowers make it one of the easiest members of the sunflower family to identify. Its dried leaves which are occasionally used in tea have a mint-like flavor. This plant is probably best known for its medicinal properties. Achilles, for whom the genus is named, evidently used extracts from this species to treat the wounds of his soldiers in the battle of Troy. It avoids the deserts of California but is otherwise common in many habitats below 3500 meters.

Ithuriel's Spear Triteleia Laxa

The blue to blue-purple flowers of Ithuriel's spear can add dazzling color to the California landscape in years with good winter rainfall. The corms which can be eaten raw or cooked were a favorite food of early California Indians. Ithuriel was an angel in Milton's Paradise Lost who found Satan squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve, and transformed him by a touch of his spear to his proper form.

Iceland Poppy Papaver Nudicaule

Iceland Poppy, originally described from Siberia is a widespread species of arctic regions of North America and Eurasia where it is one of the commonest yet most colorful wildflowers. The silky petals range in color from yellow, white, pinkish-coral, and orange. It is best known in California because it is a favorite garden plant in the cool coastal climate of the Pacific states. Each flower which measures 10-12 cm (4-5 inches) across is borne on wiry stems. They make superb cut flowers lasting up to a week if the flowers are cut in bud and the stalk tip scalded in boiling water before being placed in a vase.

Oyster Plant Tragopogon Porrifolius

Oyster Plant, a close relative of Chicory, is distinctive because of its narrow grass-like leaves, dull lilac or purple flower heads, and milky sap. In Mediterranean Europe where this plant is native, the young green shoots are added to salads. It is also cultivated for the swollen fleshy rootstock that is cooked and said to have the flavor of oysters. In California, where this plant is introduced, it is a widespread weed of waste places largely unappreciated for its culinary virtues.

Bill's Blooming Hobby

Visitors to a select private Northern California campground have a unique tool for identifying the trees and flowers they see — an album of photographs and copies of identifying leaves assembled by Bill Hewlett. For nearly 50 years, Bill has been studying the plants and trees in all the places where he has spent time. An avid outdoorsman all his life, Bill's career as a part-time naturalist was sparked when the Army stationed Bill and his late wife, Flora, in Washington D.C. during World War II. On one of their frequent visits to Rock Creek Park, he realized that he didn't recognize any of the trees in the area. And when he returned to California, he realized he didn't know much about the trees and flowers here, either.

After reading to acquire a background in botany, he was soon photographing and identifying the trees and wildflowers he saw on camping, hiking, mountain climbing, and fishing trips. Over the years, his collection of photographs has grown to more than 400 different trees and flowers, from areas as diverse as the Santa Cruz and Sierra mountains of California, the American Great Plains, and the mountains of Europe.

Among his favorites from all the beautiful flowers he has photographed are those with the common name Mariposa, including the White Mariposa (Calochortus venustus). The name ties these flowers to the butterflies and Sequoia groves in the foothills and mountains of Mariposa County in eastern California.

The dream of every naturalist, amateur or professional, is to discover an as yet unnamed flower or plant and bring it to the attention of the scientific community. While this has not happened in Bill's years as a naturalist, he still enjoys the challenge of making a difficult identification.

"It is not too hard to make an educated guess as to the genus," he said. "It is the species that is difficult, but the average person is not interested in whether it is an 'Iris douglandiana' or an 'Iris macrosiphon.' Except for the expert, it is sufficient to know that it is an 'Iris.' But there is a challenge to try and find out the species. It is the difference between a job well done and a job half done."

And, as he notes happily, "there will always be new plants to identify."

More on How Canon got its flash back

As reader juadlam suggests in his or her comments to my previous post on the book about Fujio Mitarai, the comments and questions raised require a new post. First, here is the comment:

So did the book include much about digital photography? The title seems spot on for a good bit of discussion about how their digital cameras came to be so strong in market. I'd be curious if their analysis covers how they seem to have made the transition to digital so well. Also creating a new division seems like quite an undertaking for a research lab. This almost sounds like another post. I expect that this is especially challenging so if the new division has any overlap with the existing divisions. It's probably even equally challenging if there is zero overlap with the existing divisions.

Posted by juadlam on 10/9/2007 3:58 PM

The book is on Fujio Mitarai and not on Canon's technology, but let me try to answer your questions anyway. The question on transitioning from analog to digital has to do with the culture of a company's head honcho, as we affectionately call presidents here in the Silicon Valley. When companies have a lock on a market, their financial success can be increased more easily by investing in a big sales force than investing in technologists. As a corollary, when a leader advances through the ranks to become the president, this leader is likely to come from sales not technology.

In sales, the formula for success is to not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and a president with a sales background will conservatively tend to muzzle anybody trying to rock the boat. In contrast, a president that has risen through the ranks as a technologist, will declare that you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you, and the competitors will indeed be out to top your technology.

You can find many case studies on this in business books. Burroughs was a classical example of a company of the first kind. More recent examples are Xerox, where in the late 70s Gary Starkweather (who later coined the cliché "how Xerox stumbled the future") had built the Lilac color laser printer/copier and explained that you can do color xerography only digitally, while his corporate management wanted to hold on to light lens processing. And of course Kodak, who early on invented many digital color technologies only to have corporate management stuck on AgX and photochemistry.

For the second kind of companies, the most vocal one is perhaps Intel with their motto that only the paranoid survive. In HP, Dave Packard had the business rule that at least 80% of the product catalog had to be in the catalog for 18 months or less, and Bill Hewlett's mantra was that HP had to create new divisions killing the old divisions before the competition did it.

Canon is such a technology company. While Xerox was busy fighting with digital vs. light lens, Canon was busy developing the digital color laser copier CLC-1, which was an immediate smash hit. Behind the scenes, Susumu Sugiura (a.k.a. Sid Sugiura in Australia), had built a large team with deep knowledge in digital color imaging. At the Canon developer conferences in 1991 and 1992 they held workshops on color appearance modeling, demonstrating they were ahead of the bleeding edge.

In 1993 the Imaging Research Center in Shimomaruko started the Digital Eye project with an initial staff of 100 R&D personnel. At the 1996 EI conference, the discussion of Yoshiro Udagawa's paper Color image processing in Canon's digital camera demonstrated a very deep understanding of the image processing for digital cameras and especially of how to make trade-offs between the various parameters.

In 2000, Canon started a company-wide movement to establish a unified standard for high image quality in all of their products, from input to output, which they called the "concept of Canon's unified high-quality color system." The technical wizards behind this effort were Shuichi Kumada and Osamu Yamada — portrayed at right — and the result was the Kyuanos color management system.

Essentially Kumada and Yamada tossed the sRGB color model operator and the ICC profiles with all their limitations out of the window and build a new system from first principles, based on color appearance modeling. Kyuanos is implemented in all Canon products and in the case of the digital cameras you are asking about, it is implemented in hardware as part of the DIGIC chip, which is at the core of all of Canon's cameras.

In essence, Canon's image processing is so good because they have been at it consistently for more than 25 years. The people behind it have become so good at what they are doing, that part of Kyuanos was even adopted by Microsoft for their Windows Vista operating system.

As I mentioned in my previous post, grooming people to excel as leaders is a difficult task but it is a crucial task for technology companies. In Canon's case, in phase III of their Excellent Global Corporation Plan, one of the key strategies is Nurture truly autonomous individuals to promote everlasting corporate innovation, which they express as follows:

For Canon to become a world-class company, our employees must strive for excellence. From a human-resource development standpoint, we will further enhance our education and training programs to cultivate capable employees who are trusted by society, and encourage employees to put into practice Canon's "Three Selfs" guiding principle. At the same time, we will step up efforts to develop insightful global leaders and business managers who actively contribute to not only progress at Canon, but also to the business world and society as a whole.

In the case of science and technology, this results in the Canon Academy of Technology with the theme Specialists Cultivating Technology.

The arcane art of leadership gestation

Today I will lift a bit the kimono to give you a glimpse on this aspect of governance. I barely have enough time to stay alive, so I apologize to use a compact European writing style instead of the more eloquent American style I am supposed to use in this blog. The occasion is today's Nobel Prize announcement.

When I used to have work assignments in corporate governance, the only business book that really helped me was Gordon Bell's book High-Tech Companies. Of course the most important lesson was on how to organically grow a balanced company, but there was also the lesson on the pygmy principle and how to build the company's leadership team.

In most herd animals, leaders are selected in duels. However, early on humans have developed the art of gestating — or grooming, in Silicon Valley lingo — leaders. It probably started with shamans, but by the time of Egypt's first dynasties it was already a well developed structured and formal process assigned to the monasteries, an institution the Pharaohs most likely invented for this specific purpose.

In Far Eastern cultures the main contributor to this art was Confucius, who coined the term naming names for what here in the Silicon Valley today we call pygmy hiring when it is done poorly (see for example Ryûichi Abé's The Weaving of Mantra — Kûkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse for a detailed historical analysis of how the specific method used for naming names profoundly influenced the Japanese culture and was the germinating event for the formation of Shingon). The reason I mention this specific book is that it always was — and in good part still is — an art beyond the reach of the general population, i.e. it is esoteric.

If in the past it was esoteric, today it is mostly based on wisdom and implicit knowledge, which allow the leader gestator to extrapolate current trends, assign them as directions to follow, select gifted individuals, nurture them, and finally, when they have achieved, laudate them publicly so society can follow them as examples.

When are the gestators themselves recognized? Quietly, when they have successfully predicted leadership. Today, out of sight, a former HP Labs director and the members of a selection committee in Japan are quietly celebrating their successful early identification of leaders.

Today the event is giant magnetoresistance (GMR). You can read about it and the inventors all over today's press and blogosphere because they just received the Nobel Prize in physics.

Recognition goes to Chuck Moorhouse, who at an early time recognized its merits and had HP pursue research on this theme.

Recognition goes to Koichi Kitazawa, Takehiko Ishiguro, Hidetoshi Fukuyama, Tatsuo Izawa, Tetsuya Osaka, Katsuaki Sato, Junichi Sone, Kohei Tamao for recognizing the importance of this basic research in inspiring innovative devices and giving them the 2007 Japan Prize.

And now let's close the kimono and move over to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg, and their laudation on Nobelprize.org.

Color stereoscopic images

Researchers in Israel have shown that we perceive 3-D color images even when we are presented with only one color image in a stereoscopic pair, with no depth perception degradation and only limited color degradation.

The latest print issue of SPIE's Optical Engineering dated August 2007 (Volume 46, Issue 8), has an interesting article on page (or I should write Citation Identifier, CID) 087003 with title Color stereoscopic images requiring only one color image. This paper is a beautiful piece of color psychophysics, in which the experiments were conducted both with a 1905 stereoscope and with a state of the art head-mounted display (HMD).

Stereoscopic images yield a much improved depth perception and operator performance. However, the amount of information transmitted is doubled. Obviously the left and right images contain a lot of redundant data, and various methods to compress motion images have been proposed to reduce the data stream, although a considerable computational cost hit must be taken.

The authors asked themselves, if the human visual system's fusion capability can be used to process color only of one eye's image, processing the image for the other eye just in luminance. This would cut down both device cost and data before any compression has been performed.

Indeed, the psychophysics results show that subjects perceived 3-D color images even when they were presented with only one color image in a stereoscopic pair, with no depth perception degradation and only limited color degradation in the form of a loss in vividness.

Mini review. How Canon got its flash back

Published in 2004, this book is not new. However, it was published by John Wiley Asia in Singapore, so if unlike me you do not periodically check out a Kinokunia book store, you probably never came across it.

How Canon got its flash back was written by the editorial team of NIKKEI, which stands for Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. and is the Japanese equivalent of Dow Jones here in the U.S.

In my opinion, the title promises more than the book holds, because it is not a critical business review of Canon, as we are used to get when we read similar American books about high-tech companies. In fact, the subtitle The innovative turnaround tactics of Fujio Mitarai would have been a much more appropriate title, because the book is a laudation of Fujio Mitarai.

Indeed, we learn about the positive changes Fujio Mitarai has introduced, like a better integration of the hundreds of companies that make up Canon, the introduction of a consolidated balance sheet, accountability, the ability to get an up-to-date status of the company, and the restoration of lifetime employment.

Here and there the book relates to the reader Fujio Mitarai's thoughts on various corporate governance topics, like the appointment of external directors, the role of auditors, and how you implement meritocracy in a traditional Japanese company.

Regarding manufacturing—which is a key Canon competency—the book explains in detail how cell method and ma-jime (closing the gap) was introduced and how it paid off (Chapter 2).

What we are never told in this book is what happened before Fujio Mitarai. On page 155 we learn that "The rapid appreciation of the yen in 1986 led to a sharp drop in the company's profitability. When this was then compounded by the deflating of the bubble in the Japanese domestic economy, the period from the mid 1980 to the mid 1990s turned into something of a 'lost decade' for Canon."

This concept of the lost decade comes up several times in the book, but we are never given a satisfactory explanation. In fact, the bubble did burst in 1993 and Canon had very rough time, with layoffs and abysmal employee morale. However, this cannot be the whole story.

Reading the book we are left with the impression that the lost decade was more akin to the Warrying States period in Japan, also known as Sengoku period. The book should have a chapter on this lost decade, which should answer the many questions the book leaves open. Indeed, while the book covers in detail the period of Canon's first president Takeshi Mitarai, it is completely silent about the presidents between the founder and Fujio Mitarai: Takeo Maeda (1974-), Ryuzaburo Kaku (1977-), Keizo Yamaji (1998-), and Hajime Mitarai (1993-).

Did they screw up? Where they unable to control the "war lords"? If so, who were these? During the lost decade, when I was asking Canon Inc. employees why something happened, the standard answer was to watch Ran (Chaos) and then I would understand. I got an idea, but I did not really understand who King Lear was and who Hidetora's sons were.

So the book has these strange voids, such as the Central Research Lab being like a magic castle that suddenly disappeared from Atsugi only to reappear in remote Susono in Shizuoka province, beyond Hakone. Was there a carnage like when in 1571 Oda Nobunaga destroyed the Enryaku-ji monastery.

Why was the Central Research Lab not moved to the Shimomaruko campus, like Yamaji did with the Headquarters? From the book we get that the scientists must have been more unruly than Enryaku-ji's sôhei (warrior monks), because there is a whole section entitled "Discipline paramount." Why did Canon have to implement the rule of the Five Ss: proper arrangement (seiri), cleanliness (seiso), orderliness (seiton), neatliness (seiketsu), and discipline (shitsuke), as well as Communal Possession and Functional Beauty?

When the authors write on page 78 that of these shitsuke is the most important, and on page 81 that a dress code had to be drawn up, which forced researchers to wear a prescribed jacked and forbade the wearing of jeans, one must think that these researcher must have been quite an unruly pack. This is difficult to understand when Canon historically had the tradition of cultivating their staff as heros and still continues to do so as evident from their Web site The Minds Behind Magic Special Interview.

Indeed, historically Canon has excelled in virtue of its principle of strategy being a top down process and tactics being a bottom up process. For Canon science and technology have never been intangible assets, but always brains attached to bodies that are nurtured. Today this is exemplified by their Canon Academy of Technology as depicted in the Web site Specialists Cultivating Technology.

Comparing to HP Labs, where the emphasis is on alignment with the Divisions, in Canon's Central Research Lab the emphasis is on the creation of new Divisions (page 156). Thus, one would expect their researchers to be disruptive revolutionaries or sôhei, not disciplined soldiers. Indeed, it contradicts Canon's Thee Selfs concept (page 110): self-motivation, self-management, and self-awareness.

Finally, there is the mystery of the prologue, which chronicles the exit of the PC business. This is described as the divestiture of FirePower. The FirePower system was not a business or consumer PC, it was a workstation. Its architecture with two PowerPC processors and a signal processor made it one of the best imaging systems available at that time, that would have been the ideal platform for embedded systems for a high-end printer and copier architecture.

Equally mysterious is the complete lack of any reference to Canon's competitors, such as Ricoh, Fuji Xerox, Nikon, Epson etc. Without having an idea of the ecosystem in which Canon operates, it is hard to form an overall appreciation of Fujio Mitarai's merits.

Imaging Entanglement

How a conventional tool of material science — neutron beams produced at particle accelerators and nuclear reactors — can be used to produce images of the ghostly entangled states of the quantum world.

Thank you to RocketRoo for this post:

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This press release http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=2664.php from University College London, shows a computer-generated image based on neutron-beam scattering of (anti-ferro)magnetically aligned electron spins which are entangled. So, now we have the complementary set as far is this blog is concerned: imaging with entanglement (e.g., quantum ghost imaging with photons), and imaging of entanglement (with neutrons).

Aside: The astute reader may be wondering how neutrons (which are electrically neutral by definition) can be used to image entangled electrons that are negatively charged. How can there be any interaction between these particles; a necessary condition for imaging anything?

Although electrically neutral (as is an atom that is not ionized), the neutron is a baryon and therefore composed of 3 quarks (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron), 1 of which (the 'up' quark) has +2/3 the magnitude of the electron charge and the other 2 quarks ('down' quarks) have 1/3 the electron charge. If the neutron comes close enough to an electron the individual charges will begin to influence each other and cause scattering.

It's also blog-worthy that just last week it was reported that the neutron has a negative charge both in its inner core and its outer region with a positive charge sandwiched in between to make the particle electrically neutral. Previously, Fermi had proposed in 1947 (pre-quark model) that the neutron core was postitive with the outer region negative.

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Credits: RocketRoo

Mini review. In sheep's clothing

This is my fourth mini review in the 301.7—terrorism @ home series. In this post I review a practical booklet that can help you if you or somebody for whom you care feels terrorized by somebody in their ecosystem.

In my first three mini reviews in this series I got you acquainted with books intending to build awareness: The sociopath next door, Without conscience, and Snakes in suits. These books started by informing you that 1% of the population is a psychopath and 4% are sociopaths, hence each day you come across a psychopath and four sociopaths. After stating that they are gaining more and more acceptance in society — for example in business, where the transitioning companies have become psychopath friendly — they present composite case studies to illustrate the havoc they wreak.

However, they mostly build awareness, they are not practical guides (except for hiring, in Snakes in suits). In fact, they show how difficult these people are to diagnose and tell you to never ever label anyone a sociopath or psychopath. Their only advice is to steer clear from them.

This is where Dr. George K. Simon's little booklet In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and dealing with manipulative people comes in. In short, it teaches how to recognize manipulators, label them, and deal with them by being assertive.

Again, it is important to understand the concepts of personality, which derives from the Greek word persona for mask, and character, which refers to those aspects of an individual's personality that reflect the extent to which he or she has developed and maintained personal integrity and a commitment to responsible social conduct.

Dr. Simon explains how the society of the Victorian era was repressive and caused many people to become neurotic, in response to which Freud et al. developed psychology as a technique to help people overcome neurosis. In the meantime — among others through the influence of such thought leaders as Ayn Rand and her 1957 Atlas shrugged — society has become more and more permissive, but the field of psychology is still hanging on to the premises of the Victorian era. The mission of his book is to help correct this situation.

The book explains how personality traits form a multidimensional space, one dimension in it being the axis of neurosis. When this axis is extended in the opposite direction, it reaches the psychopath syndrome. Dr. Simon teaches that when you consider just this portion of the axis, you do not have to use the term "psychopath", just the general trait, and therefore you can label people on this portion of the axis. This also frees you from having to make a formal diagnosis, you just recognize a general trait.

Dr. Simon uses terms like manipulators, covert-agressive personalities, and disordered character, which are all terms you can use informally to label people. Aggression refers to the forceful energy we all spend in our daily bids to survive, advance ourselves, secure the things we believe will bring us some kind of pleasure, and remove obstacles to those ends [p.5]. When we do not fight aggressively, we are assertive, and when we do not fight, we are neurotic. This is the axis, and Dr. Simon wants to help us staying in the healthy neutral assertive location. In short, if a person is making himself miserable, he is probably neurotic, and if he makes everyone else miserable, he is probably character-disordered

The tactics of manipulation are explained by exposing the powerful deception techniques manipulators use. Dr. Simon shows how hard it is to think clearly when someone has you emotionally on the run, and therefore even harder to recognize the tactics for what they really are. He writes: Severely disturbed covert aggressives are capable of masking a considerable degree of ruthlessness and power-thirstyness under a deceptively civil and even alluring social façade […], but even though a covert aggressive personality can be a lot more than just a manipulator, habitual manipulators are most always covert-aggressive personalities. The primary characteristic of covert-aggressive personalities is that they value winning over everything.

While the book's first part is about understanding manipulative personalities, the second part is about dealing effectively with manipulative people. Dr. Simon teaches you that to guard against victimization, you must:

• be free of potentially harmful misconceptions about human nature and behavior
• know how to correctly assess the character of others
• have high self-awareness, especially regarding those aspects of your own character that might increase your vulnerability to manipulation
• recognize and correctly label the tactics of manipulation and respond to them appropriately
• avoid fighting losing battles

If you are dealing with a person who rarely gives you a straight answer to a straight question, is always making excuses for doing hurtful things, tries to make you feel guilty, or uses any of the other tactics to throw you on the defensive and get their way, you can assume you are dealing with a person who — no matter what else he may be — is covertly aggressive.

Dr. Simon concludes [p. 142]: In many arenas of life today — political, legal, corporate, athletic, personal relationships, etc. — we have become a nation of unscrupulous, undisciplined fighters, and we are greatly damaging ourselves and our society in the process. More than ever, we need to recover a guiding set of principles about how we must conduct the daily battle to survive, prosper, and succeed.

This mini review is somewhat out of line with this blog on research. I will make up for it in the next and final post in this series on 301.7—terrorism @ home with a review of current research on psychopaths.

Positronium molecules

RocketRoo has contributed another interesting comment to the post on non-local realism of last April. A long time has past since then, and as this comment is more of a new post than a comment, I am taking the liberty to repost it here.

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UC Riverside physicists have apparently created the first observed diatomic positronium molecule.

I suppose if I write Pi = (e⁺e^-) for positronium [has to be capital pi, since lower case 'pi' is a meson = (quark-antiquark) pair], then what they have seen is Pi₂. Their formal paper has appeared in the Sept. 13 issue of Nature.

This is interesting for another reason having to do with entanglement and coherence; the subjects of this blog thread.

Positronium is basically unstable, and when it decays by falling into itself (like falling down a set of quantum stairs) it usually gives off 1,2,3,… photons (depending on the number of stairs). The most common decay channel is 2 photons. John Wheeler (he of the so-called "delayed-choice" interferometer, amongst other things) suggested in c.1945 that these photons should have complemetary polarizations. In fact, they were the first entangled photons produced in the lab c.1949 by Wu and Shaknov at Columbia Univ. In today's lingo, they are type-II entangled.

Because of the annihilation energy involved, however, these are gamma-ray photons. So, we have the odd situation where it is "easier" to produce entangled gamma-photons than coherent gamma-photons! That's where the Pi₂ comes in. The diatomic form occurs on a silica (sand) substrate. One goal is to get enough of these groupings on the substrate to form a BEC (see Chaotic light sources comments). That, it seems, would allow one to have more than one source emitting simultaneously and therefore phase-coherently. Voilà! The gamma-ray laser.

From this I can't tell how what the binding orbitals are, how the diatoms bind to the substrate or what temperatures apply. Perhaps someone who takes a look at the Nature paper when it comes out, can report on that.

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Credits: RocketRoo

Retinoid metabolism in the eye

Our regular reader RocketRoo has recently contributed an interesting comment to the post on non-local realism of last April. A long time has past since then, and as this comment is more of a two-post than a comment, I am taking the liberty to repost it here. This is the second part:

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RETINOID METABOLISM IN THE EYE

The arrangement of the retina is like connecting a bunch of CCDs such that all the connecting wires lie in front between the light source and the detectors. (See http://thalamus.wustl.edu/course/eyeret.html, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina for more background).

The metabolism behind photo-detection in the eye involves a kind of charge-discharge cycle, similar to the ATP (adenosine triphosphate) cycle used in bioluminescence (photo-production vs. photo-detection) e.g., fireflies. The chemical energy barrier is lowered via the clever use of enzymes (luciferase in the case of the firefly) . In vision chemistry, the enzyme is lecithin:retinol acyltransferase (aka LRAT). (See http://webvision.med.utah.edu/ for an animation).

Vitamin A and retinene, the carotenoid precursors of rhodopsin, occur in a variety of molecular shapes, cis-trans isomers of one another. For the synthesis of rhodopsin a specific cis isomer of vitamin A is needed. Ordinary crystalline vitamin A, as also the commercial synthetic product, both primarily all-trans, are ineffective. Vitamin A is an isomer aka all-trans-retinol. The -ol ending means the molecule overall acts like an alcohol. It is synthesized in the human body from precursor compounds like beta-carotene (a carotenoid), which is why carrots are suggested to improve night vision. The major role for vitamin A in the eye is to provide the chromophore of the visual pigment, the molecule responsible for the detection of incoming photons.

For more details on cis/trans isomers, see http://www.chemguide.co.uk/basicorg/isomerism/geometric.html. The cis-trans conversion in rhodopsin occurs in picoseconds! (see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1977Natur.269..179G)

Esterification is the process of combining an alcohol with an acid. An ester can be thought of as the organic analog of a salt. An inorganic salt is formed by reacting a base (e.g., sodium hydroxide) with an acid (e.g., sulfuric acid) to produce sodium sulphate and water. In biological systems, the acid is often a carboxylic acid (e.g., vinegar: acetic acid) and the base is replaced by an alcohol (in the organic chemistry sense). The esterification of ethanol (common "alcohol") and acetic acid produces ethyl acetate, which gives certain wines their fruity aroma.

The visual pigment is composed of a chromophore, 11-cis-retinal (the corresponding aldehyde), covalently linked to a protein, opsin, and is concentrated in the outer parts of the rod and cone photoreceptors; the cells responsible for the conversion of light to an electrical signal. Light isomerizes the rhodopsin retinyl chromophore into an all-trans configuration. The chromophore is released and reduced in the rod to form all-trans-retinol. All-trans-retinol is transported to the retinal pigment epithelial cells, where it is esterified by LRAT. All-trans-retinyl esters are stored in the retinosomes and/or utilized for production of 11-cis-retinol through enzymatic hydrolysis and isomerization. Oxidation of 11-cis-retinol to retinal, the subsequent transport to rod outer segments, and binding to opsin complete the cycle.

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Credits: RocketRoo

Links mentioned in the comments:

• http://www.cell.com/content/issue?volume=130&issue=3
• http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/293/23/2847
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WSN-4PCRH3P-J&_user=10&_coverDate=08%2F10%2F2007&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4bfb751e3bbd5294fef36680f3e2e428