Here’s a test of the High HDR effect on the Camera360 app for Android. Not bad.
The MPAA claims that piracy costs the entertainment industry 375,000 jobs and $16 billion in revenue every year. This estimate is misleading because it appears to be based on the assumption that every person who pirates content would have purchased that content otherwise. It should be obvious why that assumption is wrong. The cheaper you make something, the more people will buy it, and if you make it free, even more will take it. We witnessed this phenomenon recently when the new Lady Gaga album sold on Amazon.com for 99 cents and the volume of purchases crashed their servers. I guarantee you most of those people would not have purchased the album if it cost $10 (myself included).
Ironically, while the MPAA is making these claims, the movie industry is making record profits in things like theater ticket sales. Sure, DVD sales are down, but (legal) online streaming is way up. So, I don’t see how they are losing 375,000 jobs, but even if they are, there is no way to know how many of those jobs were lost to piracy, because there is no direct one-to-one correspondence between pirated downloads and lost sales.
The vast majority of people who pirate content would not have purchased it otherwise, and the people who always planned to purchase it, did. That is why, somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, massive piracy is probably only marginally harming the entertainment industry.
If you’re panicked because your Zodiac sign just changed to Ophiuchus, and now you don’t know what your traits are, let me help: you’re a gullible dumbass. — Bill Maher
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
…
“Basically, this is a brief soundbite,” the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. “The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on,” she or he will continue.
…
This paragraph will explain that while some scientists believe one thing to be true, other people believe another, different thing to be true.
In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and since the research probably hasn’t even been published yet for them to see it, their response to my e-mail will be bland and non-committal.
“The research is useful”, they will say, “and gives us new information. However, we need more research before we can say if the conclusions are correct, so I would advise caution for now.”
I still think this is awesome. Her real name, Natalie Hershlag, appears on a paper published in the journal NeuroImage in 2002. Here’s the full title, authors and abstract:
Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy
Abigail A. Baird, Jerome Kagan, Thomas Gaudette, Kathryne A. Walz, Natalie Hershlag, David A. Boas
The ability to create and hold a mental schema of an object is one of the milestones in cognitive development. Developmental scientists have named the behavioral manifestation of this competence object permanence. Convergent evidence indicates that frontal lobe maturation plays a critical role in the display of object permanence, but methodological and ethical constrains have made it difficult to collect neurophysiological evidence from awake, behaving infants. Near-infrared spectroscopy provides a noninvasive assessment of changes in oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin and total hemoglobin concentration within a prescribed region. The evidence described in this report reveals that the emergence of object permanence is related to an increase in hemoglobin concentration in frontal cortex.
Natalie was an undergrad psychology major at Harvard when this paper came out. To be fair, she’s listed second from last, which is usually the person who does the least amount of work. The first author does the most work, and that decreases until you get to the last author, which is usually the principal investigator: the person who runs the lab, receives the grant, and writes the paper. The first few names are probably grad students or postdocs. As an undergrad, Natalie probably did some technician-level work in this project, but I could be wrong.
The paper actually covers an interesting topic: brain changes in infants as they develop object permanence. That is, at around 7-9 months of age, infants start to recognize that objects still exist even when they can’t see those objects. This is associated with maturation of the frontal lobes. The traditional ways to measure brain activity, fMRI and PET scans, are not approved for non-clinical use with infants and would require sedation to remove motion artifacts. So, in this study they employed near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which uses light at a wavelength of 750-1000 nm, beyond the visible spectrum, that can pass through normal tissue but gets absorbed by hemoglobin. Apparently, the whole system can be attached to the head, allowing free motion for the subject. Thus they could measure changes in brain oxygen utilization in infants.
They measured 12 infants, starting at 5 months of age and continuing at 4 week intervals until 12 months. The infants were given four object permanence tests, which involved allowing the infant to play with a toy, then placing the toy under a cloth, waiting for 3 s, and seeing if the infant went to look for the toy. If it did, the subject was classified as having achieved object permanence.
Basically, when comparing the prepermanent and permanent time periods, they found a significant increase in total hemoglobin, and especially oxygenated hemoglobin, in the permanent period, supporting the idea that frontal lobe maturation and activation was occurring. The paper describes how they analyzed the data in several ways, and admits some limitations to the study.
Publication of this paper allowed Natalie to be one of the few people in the world with an Erdos-Bacon number: 6.
So, off the top of your head, in how many steps can you link Natalie Portman to Kevin Bacon? And if that was easy, link her to Paul Erdos. :)