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

Colored Time

"I have a meeting at purple o'clock." Say what!?

Meet the TimeHue® clock that represents time in HSL color space.

Frankly, I don't get it. Looks to me like a huge impedance mismatch for cognition. I'd have to keep checking my watch to decode it.

Finding structure in large data sets

In color science we do not have sufficient knowledge about the visual system to formulate analytical models. However, in the past two centuries we have accumulated sufficient knowledge, that we do not have to resort to machine learning approaches like hidden Markov methods either. We are able to come up with equations that correlate well with what is perceived.

One would then assume, that color scientists excel in the mathematical statistics branch of correlations. Alas, the practice is less glorious and we tend to rely on Pearson's correlation to gauge the strength of association between pairs of stochastic variables. The caveat is that Pearson's correlation captures only linear correlation.

Mechanical Turk

For our studies in color naming we have used two kind of experiments to elicit color terms: traditional tightly controlled psychophysics experiments in our laboratory, and crowdsourcing. There is a third kind of experiments, which does not rely neither on our acquaintances nor on our fans on the Internet: paid subjects.

Where did they end up?

Sometimes people are in the news so relentlessly, that we almost think of them as close acquaintances. The American media system is so hyperactive, that except for people who are famous for being famous, these people disappear from the media's radar screen and go back to their normal lives after a short while. However, sometimes they make a career change and end up in unexpected places. I am always surprised by high tech people ending up in epicurean posts.

Need an extra eye?

A natural bioelectrical current jumpstarts normal eye development in frogs, researchers have discovered—suggesting a new route toward repairing damaged or diseased eyes.

Almost all cell membranes have "ion channels" that let charged particles move in and out—the essence of an electrical current. But the first clue that bioelectricity might be critical to eyes came a decade ago when Michael Levin at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and his colleagues altered the number of ion channels in cells in different parts of a frog embryo and found that lens and retinal tissue formed outside the head. Later work by others showed that cells destined to become eyes had an excessive negative charge.

Levin's team has now verified that these pre-eye cells were hyperpolarized, produced DNA regulatory proteins important for eye formation, and did become a lens and retina. Modifying the function of ion channels in four-cell frog embryos led to eyes in the tail and on the gut, but only where cells experienced a particular voltage range, the researchers reported this week in Development. "Bioelectrical information is both necessary and sufficient for inducing development of the vertebrate eye," comments James Coffman, a developmental biologist at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove, Maine.

Read the full article My, Your Eyes Are So Electric.

color vision challenges in electronic imaging

It has been a long summer and autumn with all interrupts disabled. Now that the product is finished and transferred, we can resurface and catch up with life, which is made easier by doing 脱藩 (dappan).

The SPIE just released a new video explaining how teaching cameras how to "see" as humans do is both an art and a science, and Edwin Land spent his career pursuing that goal. Here is the link: http://spie.org/x83130.xml?ArticleID=x83130

Given the recent events here in Palo Alto, the op-ed linked at the bottom of that page is also a good read.

The Colorful Blind Painter

Turkish painter, Esref Armagan (shown seated in the upper left panel), has been completely blind from the time he was born in 1953. Nonetheless, he has been drawing and painting since childhood. Not only is he able to produce images with the correct shape and perspective—more importantly for readers of this blog—he is able to produce correct colors that he has never seen . The astonishing accuracy of his work is shown here in the other three panels and, as a result, he has held exhibitions in Turkey, Holland and the Czech Republic.

This being the 21st century, naturally his brain has been probed using fMRI and written up in Harvard Medicine:

"As expected, as Armagan drew, the frontal–parietal region of his cortex became active—this area is known to transform perception into two-dimensional imagery and to coordinate sensory–motor information in sighted and nonsighted artists alike. What surprised the researchers was the robust activity in Armagan’s occipital cortex, a region devoted to visual processing."

Glad that's all sorted.

Colorful Language

Eleanor Maclure graduated from BA (Hons) Graphic Design at Nottingham Trent University in 2006 and worked as a graphic designer for a large international architectural practice until the start of 2010. She has studied part time for an MA in graphic design at London College of Communication.

Currently she is a postgraduate design student and is doing research about how we communicate color to each other, looking at some of the issues with understanding color names.

Her interest in how people talk about color stems from a range of sources; discussions about re-branding at her previous employer, the way colors are described in fashion trend reporting, and the fact that people have endless disagreements over the color of some objects due to our subjective experiences of color.

Eleanor has a survey that she doing for her research and you can help her by taking part at her survey at this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/T2PCTBK.

Macallan RPS awards

The Royal Photographic Society in London has announced the Macallan Royal Photographic Society Awards for 2011.

The Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship, in recognition of an invention, research, publication or other contribution which has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in their widest sense, goes to Rodney Shaw, President and cofounder of White Rose Digital, which provides user-friendly imaging-methodologies for digital photographers.

Phil Green, will receive the Davies Medal, which is awarded for a significant contribution in the digital field of imaging science. Instituted in 1998 and sponsored by Kodak European Research and Development, the medal is in memory of Dr. E.R. Davies, a former Research Director of their Harrow Laboratories.

Shaw and Green will receive their awards at the ceremony which will take place on 8 September 2011 at the Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, London.