Local optimization

I received a question about the paper Assessing color reproduction tolerances in commercial print workflow mentioned in a recent post. The interlocutor asks why I bother creating custom color scales, instead of just using the Farnsworth's 100 Munsell hues: the implementation would be much simpler.

I believe this question is a nice example of the difference between a color engineer and a color scientist. Let me explain:

Shining Silver Surfer in the Snow

What do you do with several hundred LEDs? You make a movie like this:

Easy, right? After all, LEDs work better at low temps. Well, maybe not.

Why Doesn't Your Camera Look Like a Telescope?

The visual balance between globality and interactions

Lucia Ronchi's book The visual balance between globality and interactions is available via open access from Google Books from this link: http://books.google.com/books?id=HZDUqzJ7er8C.

This is the foreword:

This review on the current state of experimental visual research mainly concerns the response to complex test objects, involving the conjunction of several stimulus features, followed by the activation of various mechanisms, hierarchically located at different levels along the visual pathway. The prediction of the response is complicated by the underlying jungle of mutual interactions, as shown by the recent modelling. From the stand point of the laboratory experiment, the traditional response indexes need to be flanked by the so called «global" responses. A glance to the literature appeared during the past two decades reveals that this topic is not new, however is seems to us that it is yet at the specialized levels, and an educational simplification would be needed.

The present preliminary attempt along these lines is divided into two parts. First of all, our experimentation performed during the past eleven years is described, by using an assumed global index, the visual balance, per se not new, because it has been discussed as one of the ingredients of perceptual harmony during the past two centuries. In the second part, the plethora of concepts underlying the concept of balance and its visual process are summarized, after a glance to the more-or less recent visual literature.

The command to Download the PDF is hidden under the cogwheel icon.

Assessing color reproduction tolerances in commercial print workflow

The presentation of this paper was somewhat hasty, because I forgot to finish the slides. I only realized this while I was setting up my laptop and quickly thumbed through the slides. I only had the short time during the break to quickly assemble the presentation by copying chunks from the paper, while also trying to help Dr. Tastl who was having a problem getting PowerPoint to recognize the projector. I guess this is what happens when we are burnt out…

Harmonious colors: from alchemy to science

Last weekend three storms swept through the Bay Area and it was a good thing, because it cleaned up the very dirty air. The attendees of Electronic Imaging enjoyed a perfect weather.

The First Time Ever I Heard Your Face

Neil Harbisson is a color-blind (achromatopsia) artist from Spain who has a cybernetic "third eye" attached to his head that enables him to hear color. This also makes him a genuine cyborg. Since 2005, Harbisson has used his sonochromatic retina to design sound portraits of famous people. The first person he experimented on was the immediate heir to the British throne, HRH The Prince of Wales.

He scans the eyes, hair and skin color of his subjects and works the individual notes into a musical chord. Harbisson explained, “Prince Charles noticed my electronic eye so, I politely asked him if I could listen to his face.” Apparently Prince Charles' lips sounded like a high E [a blue blood? --njg]. But his hair was almost inaudible—musically thin due to male-pattern baldness.

Some notable quotes from a recent BBC Outlook interview:

• Color as words are "really, really, really, impossible to understand"
• "Color has a frequency that we can't hear"
• "Red is between F and F^#" [? I would've thought it was A/A^#. --njg]
• "I hear the color through my bones, not through my ears"
• The BBC interviewer's voice is "between orange and red"
• Neil's fave "color" is Aubergine, which has a high pitched tone
• "White is silent" [? I would've thought that was black. --njg]

And finally, here is Neil with his Eyeborg on daily maneuvers (video).

Related post: The Colorful Blind Painter

R&D not sufficient for success

As a follow-up on our previous post, the Economist has an interesting blog post Gone in a flash, which delves in the problem that for a technology company research is necessary but not sufficient for success, as I had pointed out in an earlier analysis of the fruits of R&D investment over a long time period.

An interesting comment in the Economist's blog post is that mergers and acquisitions are not necessarily useful. As Geoffrey A. Moore wrote in his latest book, the acquisition of a company is only fruitful if the buyer already has knowledge of that company's technology, so it can digest it.

If R&D is necessary, is it sufficient that a company must be able to digest research to feed its business? Digesting research is very difficult; maybe this is why companies fail over time: they are unable to find the leaders with this skill.

Why is Kodak near death while Fujifilm is thriving?

Fascinating perspective in The Economist. Here are some quotes:

Fujifilm, too, saw omens of digital doom as early as the 1980s. It developed a three-pronged strategy: to squeeze as much money out of the film business as possible, to prepare for the switch to digital and to develop new business lines.

Kodak had become a complacent monopolist. Fujifilm exposed this weakness by bagging the sponsorship of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles while Kodak dithered. The publicity helped Fujifilm’s far cheaper film invade Kodak’s home market.

Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it,” says Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School, who has advised the firm.

Hindsight is always 20/20 but that last quote is reminiscent of the difference in business philosophy between Microsoft and Apple. One wonders what Steve Jobs might have said about that. We do know what Bob Lutz (former Vice Chairman of General Motors) thinks about Ivy League business schools and MBA spreadsheet-based business strategies.

Postscript: See the Comments below for additional perspective.

Crows Remember Colors For A Year

Researchers have recently found that crows possess a long-term memory that allows them to remember colors for at least a year, a talent they use to successfully select containers containing food in experiments based on color cues after extended intervals. "It is not easy even for human beings to remember visual color information for a year. Crows may be even better than human beings in a certain aspect of memory," said Shoei Sugita, a professor of animal morphology at Utsunomiya University who led the joint research with Chubu Electric Power Co. The finding came as part of a study that Chubu Electric, troubled by problems presented by crows' nests on power line towers, commissioned in 2008.

Source: Science & Technology News from Japan, December 2011 • Dr. Felix Moesner