Brilliance, contrast, colorfulness, and the perceived volume of device color gamut

With the advent of digital video and cinema media technologies, much more is possible in achieving brighter and more vibrant colors, colors that transcend our experience. The challenge is in the realization of these possibilities in an industry rooted in 1950s technology where color gamut is represented with little or no insight into the way an observer perceives color as a complex mixture of the observer’s intentions, desires, and interests. By today’s standards, five perceptual attributes – brightness, lightness, colorfulness, chroma, and hue - are believed to be required for a complete specification. As a compelling case for such a representation, a display system is demonstrated that is capable of displaying color beyond the realm of object color, perceptually even beyond the spectrum locus of pure color. All this begs the question: Just what is meant by perceptual gamut? To this end, the attributes of perceptual gamut are identified through psychometric testing and the color appearance models CIELAB and CIECAM02. Then, by way of demonstration, these attributes were manipulated to test their application in wide gamut displays. In concert with these perceptual attributes and their manipulation, Ralph M. Evans’ concept of brilliance as an attribute of perception that extends beyond the realm of everyday experience, and the theoretical studies of brilliance by Y. Nayatani, a method was developed for producing brighter, more colorful colors and deeper, darker colors with the aim of preserving object color perception – flesh tones in particular. The method was successfully demonstrated and tested in real images using psychophysical methods in the very real, practical application of expanding the gamut of sRGB into an emulation of the wide gamut, xvYCC encoding

Russell Kirk and the Rhetoric of Order

The corpus of historically-minded man of letters and twentieth century leader among conservatives, Russell Amos Kirk, prompts one to reflect upon a realist rhetoric of order for conservative discourse in particular and public argumentation in general. In view of building a realist rhetoric of order within the present spectrum of modern to postmodern thought, this dissertation project contains two related layers of study. At one level, the author both builds and departs from the realist approach to communicative epistemology known as rhetorical perspectivism toward a theoretical framework for the study of rhetoric that is based upon Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas\u27s legacy of classical realism. At another level, in light of the significance of Russell Kirk for the question of conservatism and postmodernism, from the vantage point of realism, the author considers Kirk\u27s view on imagination, language, and life as against certain aspects of Hans Georg Gadamer\u27s philosophical hermeneutics. This comparison, next to a rhetorical theoretical study of The Roots of American Order regarding the essential constancy of human nature as such through history, points to some avenues by which Kirk\u27s imaginative standpoint provides a way of taking the imagination as formative of communicative perspectives within and across rhetorical situations. For conservative discourse and beyond, within this age of epistemological skepticism and moral relativism, Kirk\u27s corpus provides for some ethical prospects for persuasion in terms of both argument and narrative, inclusive of the natural law as a basis for rhetorical ethics. In establishing parameters for a realist rhetoric of order, the author relies upon the work of Richard M. Weaver, who contributed to both movement conservatism and rhetorical theory during the twentieth century. In particular, the author embraces Weaver\u27s connecting of genuine conservatism to philosophical realism, notwithstanding some necessary correctives toward classical realism regarding reality and ideation. Although this project in large part operates within the realm of rhetorical theory, some implications for the practice, criticism, and pedagogy of rhetoric are highlighted along the way with respect to a realist rhetoric of order

November 1, 2001

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

The Righteous and the Woke: “Racists,” “Radicals,” and the Moralization of American Political Communication

In the study of politics and media, scholars have often focused on the epistemological basis of democracy. This emphasis, while worthy of study, tends to overlook the ways in which the same pieces of information can be subject to radically different partisan and moral interpretations. Despite its presence across many strains of communication scholarship, the idea of morality in political communication is rarely expressly theorized or developed as an object of analysis.In this dissertation, I center morality in the study of political communication, building on the extant literature to develop an analytical framework for and empirical approach to the study of morality in political communication. I argue that partisans have identity-based motivations to employ particular forms of moral political communication. Further, I expand conceptions of moral political communication past simply its religious form, considering how moral claims can also encompass particular (and partisan) ideas of social justice and rights as well as democratic citizenship. This framework catches powerful forms of routine political discourse that are largely missed by existing theories and models, and can map powerfully onto other central concepts in political communication research—from disinformation to populism to polarization.Applying this framework to mixed-method content analyses of 2020 U.S. election discourse among political opinion media and political campaigners, I then empirically establish the structure, nature, and strategic aims of moral political communication, and examine these moral performances along lines of partisan division. Results reveal the pervasive nature of moral political communication—particularly along civic lines—in spaces of political opinion and demonstrated how it emerged in 2020 electoral discourse. Qualitative, retrodictive analyses of moral keywords show how political actors draw upon particular moral terms to invoke distinctly partisan moral meanings. In doing so, elite political actors both attract and perform for particular identity coalitions, articulating and reinforcing what it means to be a ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’ in moral terms. These moral performances have important consequences—not simply for the composition and mobilization of identity groups, but also for how competing moral visions of democracy are enacted in political discourse, policymaking, and even political violence.Doctor of Philosoph

Essays on monetary policy

This is a summary of the four chapters that comprise this D.Phil. thesis.1 This thesis examines two major aspects of policy. The first two chapters examine monetary policy communication. The second two examine the causes and consequences of a time-varying reaction function of the central bank. 1. Central Bank Communication and Higher Moments In this first chapter, I investigate which parts of central bank communication affect the higher moments of expectations embedded in financial market pricing. Much of the literature on central bank communication has focused on how communication impacts the conditional expected mean of future policy. But this chapter asks how central bank communication affects the second and third moments of the financial market’s perceived distribution of future policy decisions. I use high frequency changes in option-prices around Bank of England communications to show that communication affects higher moments of the distribution of expectations. I find that the relevant communication in the case of the Bank of England is primarily confined to the information contained in the Q&A and Statement, rather than the longer Inflation Report. 2. Mark My Words: The Transmission of Central Bank Communication to the General Public via the Print Media In the second chapter, jointly with James Brookes, I ask how central banks can change their communication in order to receive greater newspaper coverage, if that is indeed an objective of theirs. We use computational linguistics combined with an event-study methodology to measure the extent of news coverage a central bank communication receives, and the textual features that might cause a communication to be more (or less) likely to be considered newsworthy. We consider the case of the Bank of England, and estimate the relationship between news coverage and central bank communication implied by our model. We find that the interaction between the state of the economy and the way in which the Bank of England writes its communication is important for determining news coverage. We provide concrete suggestions for ways in which central bank communication can increase its news coverage by improving readability in line with our results. 3. Uncertainty and Time-varying Monetary Policy In the third chapter, together with Michael McMahon, I investigate the links between uncertainty and the reaction function of the Federal Reserve. US macroeconomic evidence points to higher economic volatility being positively correlated with more aggressive monetary policy responses. This represents a challenge for “good policy” explanations of the Great Moderation which map a more aggressive monetary response to reduced volatility. While some models of monetary policy under uncertainty can match this comovement qualitatively, these models do not, on their own, account for the reaction-function changes quantitatively for reasonable changes in uncertainty. We present a number of alternative sources of uncertainty that we believe should be more prevalent in the literature on monetary policy. 4. The Element(s) of Surprise In the final chapter, together with Michael McMahon, I analyse the implications for monetary surprises of time-varying reaction functions. Monetary policy surprises are driven by several separate forces. We argue that many of the surprises in monetary policy instruments are driven by unexpected changes in the reaction function of policymakers. We show that these reaction function surprises are fundamentally different from monetary policy shocks in their effect on the economy, are likely endogenous to the state, and unable to removed using current orthogonalisation procedures. As a result monetary policy surprises should not be used to measure the effect of a monetary policy “shock” to the economy. We find evidence for reaction function surprises in the features of the high frequency asset price surprise data and in analysing the text of a major US economic forecaster. Further, we show that periods in which an estimated macro model suggests policymakers have switched reaction functions provide the majority of variation in monetary policy surprises

Byte ME piece on selling lobsters over the Internet. Russell Turner, formerly

Byte ME piece on selling lobsters over the Internet. Russell Turner, formerly of Raoul\u27s and the State Theatre, started Maine Lobster Direct in January, while Tiny Whintle of Tiny\u27s Bigman Seafood has set up a cybershop in a cybermall based in North Carolina