The Archives of Potentially Amusing Scientific Images (TAPASI)
Wherein serious but silly scientific images are archived.
A few months ago, I was having lunch with Sarah Creem-Reger at a conference at UofR. Somehow, the conversation got around to publishing and I relayed a story told to me by Irv Biederman about a conflict he had with some JEP editors about a figure he and Maggie Shiffrar wanted to include in a paper. I mentioned that I had a collection of my favorite article illustrations and Professor Creem-Reger asked me about some of my other favorites. This is the story of one such favorite and my offering of more such stories, irregularly, in the future.
The paper in question is about perceptual learning, and the image was ‘modified’ from a 1948 paper on chicken sexing. As it turns out, there are people out there who are really really good at determining the gender of baby chicks by just looking at them. They wanted to figure out how they did it (they did, read the paper), if it could be easily taught (it seems like it), and if it generalizes to other sorts of tasks (again, depending).
The caption from the Biederman & Shiffrar paper reads —
An accepted grasp for chick sexing. (Modified from “Chick Sexing” by J. H. Lunn, 1948, American Scientist, 36, pp. 280-287. Copyright 1948 by the American Scientist Photograph by the University of Minnesota Photographic Laboratory. Adapted by permission.)
The original image from Lunn (1948) shows the ‘correct hand grip for chicken sexing’, before adaptation —
and Irv and Maggie’s adaptation includes a bar over the eyes of the baby chick to preserve the anonymity of the fondled fowl —
Apparently the editors of JEP:LMC lacked a proper sense of humor or perhaps an overly serious position on humor in science. Thus, they did not want to publish the modified version (note that the peer review of the science found the work well done and relevant / interesting to the field)
An update from Irv —
It wasn’t the editor(s) of JEP: L, M, & C that stirred a bit. Roddy Roediger (the Editor) and the reviewers had no problem whatsoever with the photo. It was a woman from APA who called (perhaps from APA’s central publications office) asking me if I wanted the picture published as it was submitted. Of course I said “Yes, that I had put the black bar there.” I never pressed her as to her reason for calling. It was an era where some were confusing sex with sexist and, if memory serves, she might have voiced a vague phrase or two along those lines but perhaps felt that she did not have a winning hand (it was chickens!) and let the matter go.
This resulted in the publication of this, my favorite potentially silly scientific image. Irv and Maggie have done so much important work over the years and I encourage you to check them out. I can also assure you that Irv’s sense of humor remains unscathed.
More soon…
NB – I plan on adding items from my ‘silly images’ folder irregularly in the coming months. If you have anything that is worthy, please let me know at flip@skidmore.edu.
References
Biederman, I., & Shiffrar, M. M. (1987). Sexing day-old chicks: A case study and expert systems analysis of a difficult perceptual-learning task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13(4), 640–645. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.13.4.640
Lunn, J. H. (1948). Chick sexing. American Scientist, 36(2), 280-287.
Publish Magazine — August 1989
A short piece about our wedding announcements, printed on a 100-year-old Heidelberg press via computer graphics.
I posted an interview from fps Magazine a while back, and one of my old Wolfram Era Pals, Paul Abbott, asked about the wedding invitation mentioned in that article. I thought I had a copy somewhere, and, indeed I found it in my well curated ‘archives’ (e.g., a Bankers Box in the basement).
Turns out, Publish Magazine did a story on the work back in 1989, (written by James A. Martin) designed by me and printed by Julie Holcomb Printers. You can see a PDF of the article here. (Be sure to check out the ad from a very early Casady & Greene and reminisce about Crystal Quest, Conflict Catcher, and friends.)
Animation Magazine — 1989
Unbeknownst to me until several year later, my dad kept a copy of this in his car to show anyone he ever ran into.
Right after we completed knickknack, Animation Magazine did a story on the animation group at Pixar. We had just won the Oscar for Tin Toy so there was a lot of hype. Alas, we were not nominated. The Academy™ wanted to spread the love around I suppose. We weren’t too hurt — the film got a great reception at SIGGRAPH, there was a lot of very worthy competition that particular year, and I’ve had several people since tell me that it was their favorite of the four ‘early’ shorts (We called the master tape with those on it ‘LRTK‘ – short for “Luxo, Red’s (Dream), Tin (Toy), and knickknack). It really was a fun film. The whole group did everything — story, characters, animation, rendering, catering. That’s why the credits don’t specify any roles.
Read MoreComputer Pictures Magazine – Jan 1987
In 1984, I started working at the Ohio State Computer Graphics Research Group on a medical imaging project.
In the same basement box with interview from fps magazine that I posted a bit ago, I found a few other gems. Here’s an article from Computer Pictures magazine that features some of the work we were doing back then.
Read Morefps interview – 1995
Published from 1991-2010, fps was an excellent animation magazine with an impressive cast of regular contributors.
Shortly after I left Pixar in 1992, the publisher Emru Townsend got in touch with Tony Apodaca and me for a long-running email conversation about the early days of making those computer animation things. Over the next few years, Emru, Tony and I exchanged questions and answers over a wide range of topics surrounding computer graphics and animation.
Read MoreWhy Does the Cortex Reorganize After Sensory Loss?
Investigating the Teleology of Cortical Reorganization
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that the brain can reorganize dramatically following sensory loss. Although the existence of such neuroplastic crossmodal changes is not in doubt, the functional significance of these changes remains unclear. The dominant belief is that reorganization is compensatory. However, results thus far do not unequivocally indicate that sensory deprivation results in markedly enhanced abilities in other senses. Here, we consider alternative reasons besides sensory compensation that might drive the brain to reorganize after sensory loss. One such possibility is that the cortex reorganizes not to confer functional benefits, but to avoid undesirable physiological consequences of sensory deafferentation. Empirical assessment of the validity of this and other possibilities defines a rich program for future research.
Read MoreRetina and LGN
A demonstration written in Mathematica to show the interaction of the retina and LGN on the sampling of image information from the eyes.
You can play with the receptive field size to see how the whole “Hybrid Images” thing works. Click on the image to go to the demonstration.
Read MoreVSS 2018 – Shape scission: causal segmentation of shape
Warts, cracks, causal shape segmentation.
Research on shape perception usually focuses on the estimation of local surface geometry through cues like stereopsis, shading, or texture. Here, we argue that observers use these shape estimates to infer other object properties such as material composition and the transformation processes that generated the observed shape from this matter. We call this separation of object shape into intrinsic and extrinsic object properties shape scission. We investigated shape scission in a series of experiments with different groups of participants responding to a set of 8 unfamiliar rendered objects, each transformed by 8 transformations (e.g., “melted”, “cut”, or “inflated”). Importantly, participants could never directly compare the transformed and untransformed versions of objects.
Read MoreVSS 2018 – Gravity and Ground Plane Geometry in Perspective Images
“The small things float to the top of… gravity” — Rickie Lee Jones
Renaissance artists noticed that placing objects on a visible ground plane anchors them stably, making it easy to perceive their depth. Subsequently, they developed methods for geometric calculation of perspective by drawing construction lines defining the ground plane. Thus, the artist constructs the geometry of pictorial space, based on the station point and the view direction, then places objects in it. This practice created a scale for placing and sizing objects on a minimally patterned ground plane.
Read MoreVSS 2018 – Exploring the Uncanny Valley
Balls! Bouncing balls. This is science so we gotta start somewhere.
Mori’s Uncanny Valley phenomena isn’t limited to robotics. It has been observed in many other areas, including the fine arts, especially photorealistic painting, sculpture, computer graphics, and animation. Furthermore, heuristic practices in the arts, especially those of traditional animation, have much to offer to our understanding of the appearance of phenomenological reality. One interesting example is the use of exaggeration to mitigate un- canny valley phenomena in animation. Action captured from live performance is frequently exaggerated so as to appear less uncanny.
Read More