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Comment Big tradeoff (Score 1) 155

The first product will probably be a DSLR-sized sensor with mobile phone-type image sensor density. They are trading in a lot of pixels for this feature. You'll need 100 megapixel sensors to end up with usable image sizes as one microlens covers many sensor cells. It will be interesting to see how low light noise artifacts will look as there is bound to be a lot of them with such high sensor density.

Comment A lot of confusion about HDR. (Score 2) 107

HDR photos you find on the web are actually tone mapped photos. They were HDR when they were captured, or when different exposures were combined into a single image, but after that stage they were tone mapped in order to make all the details visible on a conventional display.

Tone mapping is something we may stop doing when we have proper HDR displays like in this article. A display like that will more closely resemble the real world, and tone mapping will be unnecessary because our eyes can handle high dynamic range images just fine.

The perfect HDR video system would be one where you could film inside of a dark cave and you would see everything on the screen after your eyes had adjusted to the dark, and when the camera moved outside into the sun the intense brightness of the screen would make you squint.

Cheesy tone mapped HDR photos make your eyes hurt for totally different reasons.
Image

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."
The Internet

Experimenting On Mechanical Turk 46

itwbennett writes "In a recent article, Dr. Markus Jakobsson, a Principal Scientist at PARC, offers some tips on effectively running human-subject research studies on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. '...[B]enefits [include] very low experiment costs, quick turn-around rates, and relatively simple approvals from human subjects boards. But you have to be careful to avoid bias and error.' says Dr. Jakobsson. For example, in many situations subjects may be biased just from knowing that they are participating in a study, or by knowing the goals of a study. To avoid this bias, you need to 'convey a different task to your subject than what you are observing — essentially deceive them — to see how they react when faced with the situation of interest. Consider a study of user reactions to phishing sites. You may, for example, say that you are studying the common reaction to online e-commerce sites, and ask them to rate how helpful various sites are, with a free-text input field where they can add other observations. You first show them three or four legitimate websites, asking them to rate and describe them; then you show them a phishing site and do the same. Will they tell you that this is a site run by fraudsters? If they do, they noticed signs of fraud without you prompting them.'" The author also gives tips on avoiding cheaters, and determining how much to pay and when.

Comment Re:Colors in photographs (Score 4, Interesting) 129

Sometimes they are false colors, often they are not. However, a telescope is vastly larger than your eyes. They gather a lot more light, even considering how much the image has been magnified.

I've watched the ring nebula through a 11 inch only to see it in black and white, yet fixed a camera to the very same telescope and gotten color pictures. There simply isn't enough light for my eyes to detect the color. Perhaps with an even larger telescope I could have.

So no, the spectacular nebula might not even be visible to the human eye in your parked space ship, but you certainly could take a long exposure with a very sensitive camera and get awesome colors.

The Orion nebula is large/close enough to be seen without any telescope, but too faint to see without.

Comment Does a human brain a human make? (Score 1) 539

Babies don't do a whole lot after they are born. Perhaps they can model an adult brain from the start, but I doubt it will act very human without years of experiencing the sensory
input of a human body. The way the human senses are wired to the brain I suspect has a lot to do with how the brain is segmented into areas with specific tasks. What a human brain-like lump of simulated neurons will be able to do is anyones guess. I'm sure looking forward to any experiments, even though this opens up a pandora's box of ethical dilemmas.
Will the simulated brain feel pain? Have fears?

Henry Markram seems too optimistic, but if he's right then this might be the starting shot for the singularity.

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